Today is a very exciting and important day for the Eclipse community.  The Eclipse Platform project has released Eclipse SDK 4.0, the next generation of the Eclipse platform.  For technical perspective on the release I point you to Mike Wilson’s excellentt blog post ‘Growing the future’.

Congratulations to the entire Eclipse 4.0 team for shipping the release (which of course was on schedule )!  It has been a long journey to get to this day.  What started out as a ‘blue sky’ BOF at EclipseCon 2007, followed by some more concrete ideas at EclipseCon 2008, the details began to emerge via a series of summits and community discussions.  It has been a great community effort.

Not everyone will agree with the decisions, ideas or architecture of Eclipse 4.0.  That is to be expected in a healthy community with lots of passionate participants.   It is a credit to the team that they have made the tough decisions and ‘shipped the code’.

The journey is far from complete.  The next step is to get Eclipse Foundation projects and Eclipse plugins to migrate to Eclipse 4.0.   This is why we have named Eclipse 4.0 an ‘early adopter release’.  Over the next number of months I am hoping every Eclipse project will migrate their code based to the new platform.  There is binary compatibility so it should be a straight forward process.  It is great to see some people have already started.

At this time, we don’t expect Eclipse IDE users or even companies to ship products based on Eclipse 4.0.  These groups tend to rely on a number of different Eclipse projects/plugins that will need to migrate to the 4.0 platform.  In 2011, I would expect the Indigo release train will include an end user release based on Eclipse 4.x.

Congratulations again to the e4 team for shipping Eclipse 4.0.  Now it is up to the rest of the community to continue the journey towards the Eclipse 4.0 platform.  Make sure you tell us your stories as you begin the process.

From http://ianskerrett.wordpress.com/2010/07/28/eclipse-sdk-4-0-the-journey-of-a-new-platform/