Eclipse Platform on Ulitzer

Microsoft was in one of its interoperability moods Wednesday and said that developers using Eclipse, the great open source IDE, will be able to target Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, its Azure cloud operating system and Silverlight.

This renewed open source invasion - Microsoft's no stranger to Eclipse although it's not a member - is being spearheaded by two open source allies of Microsoft: Canada's Tasktop Technologies for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, and France's Soyatec for Azure and Silverlight. Tasktop's CEO, by the way, created Eclipse's Mylyn project.

Anyhow, there's a new open source plug-in that's supposed to advance the industry's cloud interoperability efforts.

It offers PHP developers a series of wizards and utilities to write, debug, configure and deploy PHP applications to and from Azure - the from part being dependent on Azure dependencies of course.

The plug-in bundles the existing Azure SDK for PHP into the Eclipse PHP project and includes an Azure storage explorer for browsing data contained in Azure tables, blobs or queues.

It's in Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse at http://www.windowsazure4e.org.

Then there's a new Windows Azure SDK for Java meant to bridge Java developers over to Azure. It will let them use Azure storage services to store data, which Microsoft says will give them simple developments methods when they write web applications.

It's at http://www.windowsazure4j.org.

Microsoft and Soyatec have also RTM'd version 1.0 of the previously announced Eclipse Silverlight 2.0 plug-in, an open source, cross-platform plug-in for Eclipse developers to build Silverlight rich Internet applications. It supports the Macintosh platform, and is supposed to guide developers to greater interoperability between Silverlight-based applications and Java-based web sites and web services, including REST, SOAP, JSON and other standards.

The Silverlight widgetry is supposed to let Eclipse developers develop code for Silverlight and collaborate with developers working with Visual Studio and Expression Studio tools.

A Customer Technology Preview (CTP) was made available in March 2009 and now the RTM'd stuff at http://www.eclipse4sl.org.

Microsoft and Soyatec plan to support the current Silverlight 3.0 next year.

Meanwhile, Tasktop and Microsoft, which is providing the funding and architectural guidance for the project, are supposed to come up with early access updates to Eclipse that handle the new features in Windows 7 like Aero and in Window Server 2008 R2 and extend Eclipse's Standard Widget Toolkit to integrate Windows 7 features in Q1, moving to general release in June.