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Java 
What a week. First Holland loses the World Cup match from Portugal and everything turned from orange back to its normal color. Next, the Dutch kabinet falls after a long debate. Sun releases an updated version of Solaris 10, with ZFS a 128-bit filesystem with some other new tricks (to put it in perspective, 128 bits is enough to put every hard drive on the planet in one filesystem). WinFS (the filesystem originally planned for Vista), on the other hand, gets buried by Microsoft. And last but not least, Eclipse 3.2 arrives, only a couple hours late past the countdown timer. Eclipse 3.2 has tons of new features, better performance, and better platform support. And it runs great on the Vista beta as well. 😉
A much heard complaint about Eclipse is that it is too hard to use the different projects together. The 3.2 release is a release train called “Callisto” with the most important Eclipse projects releasing at the same time. This means all the bits will work together right from the start. This is great voor ISVs as it is much easier to align products with Eclipse projects, and it is much easier for end-users as well.
Another complaint is that it is too hard to install Eclipse and the plug-ins. I must be getting old and grumpy, but to me, clicking some download links and unzipping everything in the right directory never seemed that hard. Nevertheless, the Eclipse Callisto site offers several options to start with. After installing the base package, use the Welcome page (What’s new > new updates) to open the update wizard and get the other features you need. Pretty easy, no more clicking on download links and unzipping required.
As an alternative the Yoxos OnDemand site contains all the 3.2 options as well, plus some popular 3rd party plug-ins. Use the web-based wizard to click on everything you need, then the service will provide one big zip file with everthing in it. Very easy as well.
Finally, you can still download the stuff like back in the old days. 🙂 I decided to do that, at the customer I currently work there is no direct Internet connection, so I need the downloads. The single Yoxos zip was too big to put on my tiny memory sticks, and being old and grumpy, I like having separate zip files that I can unzip when I want. I don’t need this new-age wizardy updaty stuff. A lot of people seemed to need it though, so I am glad it is there now.