ANAHEIM, Calif.—Attendees of this year's EclipseCon conference got a glimpse Tuesday of the latest Eclipse.

In a keynote speech at the conference here, two lead Eclipse platform developers praised the newly independent organization and offered glimpses of things to come in the next version of the platform, Version 3.0.

Erich Gamma, Java Development Tools (JDT) lead for Eclipse, and John Wiegand, the Eclipse platform lead, said the new Eclipse Foundation will foster some of the same values of the open-source movement: meritocracy, open participation and transparency. The duo also shared several peeks at Eclipse 3.0 in their keynote.

Noting that the Eclipse community is vast, very active and constantly looking for more functionality such as making JDT cooler, Gamma quipped, "People are getting spoiled."

Yet, he said, the goals of Eclipse 3.0 are to mature the platform, enhance the IDE, push down functionality among the layers and open up the platform so others can update their elements when the technology changes.

Eclipse 3.0 is scheduled for release in the second quarter of this year, around the June timeframe.

Among the key new pieces of functionality in Eclipse 3.0 will be Swing/SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit) interoperability, Wiegand said. The issue of interoperability between Swing and SWT is making news these days, as Sun Microsystems Inc., which supports Swing, is looking at joining or working with Eclipse in some way. SWT and Swing are dueling Java graphical user interface libraries. SWT is the IBM-backed library that is part of the Eclipse platform, and Swing is Sun's technology and part of the Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) platform.

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