Genuitec, a provider of tools for the Eclipse open source developer community, announced the availability of Webclipse, an integrated development environment (IDE) add-on for JavaScript and Java EE development.

Webclipse improves the modern coding experience by delivering new features like Hot Reload, JavaScript Debug, REST Inspect and more, the company said. Developers writing modern applications find themselves frequently moving between layers of the stack. With Webclipse, developers can stay in their familiar Eclipse development environment yet develop and debug JavaScript, consume and create Web services and spend more time coding.

The product helps to fulfill the needs of the full stack Eclipse developer, said Tim Webb, director of innovation at Genuitec.

"The ability of developers to easily create JavaScript content anywhere in their stack is becoming increasingly important for Web developers," said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, in a statement. "Webclipse support for node.js and advanced web technology provides an interesting new addition to this growing market."

Webb said there are three key features in Webclipse that boost the Eclipse development stack. The first is Hot Reload, an improved version of Hot Code Replace, which focuses on time spent in re-deploying and restarting after class changes. Hot Reload enables developers to see these changes instantly in their Tomcat and WebLogic application servers, providing improved Web development speed.

The second key feature is JavaScript Debug. It provides integrated JavaScript debugging inside Eclipse directly to external Chrome browsers. Not only that, it also provides support for Node.js with debugging of Node applications.

REST Inspect, another key Webclipse feature, enables developers to integrate RESTful Web services. Webclipse initially supports Java API for RESTful Web Services (JAX-RS) and RESTful API Modeling Language (RAML) definitions to facilitate web service coding. Developers can also test other Web services from within their Eclipse stack.

Genuitec is offering Webclipse free to developers for the first year.

At the end of June, the Eclipse Foundation announced the availability of the Mars release, the tenth shipment of the organization’s annual Eclipse release train. The release train is a coordinated release of multiple Eclipse projects. The Mars release represents the work of 79 different open source projects, 65 million lines of code and involved 380 Eclipse committees.

“Ten years of shipping coordinated release trains, which were all on time to the day, is a great accomplishment by the Eclipse community,” Milinkovich said. “This predictable release schedule has been a huge benefit to our community and ecosystem, and has encouraged widespread adoption of Eclipse technology.”

With the Mars release, Java developers can take advantage of new features in the Eclipse IDE, including new Quick Fixes for Java 8, a hierarchical presentation for nested projects in the Project Explorer, the ability to customize perspectives, and speed improvements for text search. Also, the Eclipse Linux Tools project now includes integrated tools that allow Eclipse users to build and manage Docker containers and images.

In an effort to improve the quality of all Eclipse projects, Mars brings a new automated error reporting feature to the Eclipse packages. If an error occurs in Eclipse, the user will be prompted to automatically send an error report to the appropriate Eclipse project team.

In addition, a new project called Oomph makes it easier to install an Eclipse IDE and to provision a project-specific Eclipse workspace. Oomph also makes it possible to record and share user preference settings across work spaces.

Mars also adds first-class Gradle support inside the Eclipse IDE. The new project, Buildship, makes it possible for developers to set up, configure, and initiate Gradle builds from Eclipse.

Improved Maven support in Mars makes it easier for developers to use Maven from Eclipse. The new release includes support for Maven 3.3.3, improved Maven archetypes integration, enhanced auto-completion in the pom editor, and experimental support for automatic configuration updates.

Version 3.0 of the Eclipse Sirius modeling tool project introduces new usability features to help users create diagrams, significant performance gains for large models, and improvements to the query language that makes it easier to write and validate expressions.

Meanwhile, the Eclipse Jubula project, which provides the Jubula automated testing tool, has released a client API that enables developers to create test cases in Java. This allows Java developers to develop and maintain test cases in Eclipse and store those test cases in code repositories, such as Git.

Finally, an early access version of the Java 9 support in Eclipse is available on the Eclipse Marketplace. This will allow Eclipse users to use Java 9 in the Eclipse IDE.