Eclipse

I just donated to the Eclipse Foundation and became a "Friend of Eclipse". I've been using the Eclipse platform for years for a variety of applications both professional and personal. It has certainly paid me, so I thought it was time to give a little back.

ATF, we miss you

One of the reasons I donated was to help support the PDT (PHP Development Tools) and ATF (AJAX Tools Framework) Eclipse projects (although I also use the Java and C/C++ tools pretty heavily too). PDT is rapidly become the standard platform for PHP development and ongoing work on the project has been robust.

The ATF is a great project, but has been a bit resource starved for the past year or so. ATF allows you to integrate with your favorite AJAX toolkit (like Dojo, jQuery or whatever) and then develop and debug Javascript code using the embedded Mozilla XULRunner. It's a very slick way to develop Javascript code without shelling out big bucks for a commercial package. Unfortunately, the last stable build was released nearly a year ago and doesn't run on Ganymede (the current version of Eclipse).

Hopefully, we'll see a new release from the ATF project soon.