The bits for WTP 1.0 were baked last Friday and are cooling off now in preparation for their "official" release on 2005-12-23. However, if you have a pair of oven mitts handy, feel free to download it now and munch this tasty snack over your Holiday break. Unless we discover some late-breaking show-stopper, the bits you'll get are actually RC5 which, as the name suggests, was our fitth attempt to produce a result that was worthy of vendor adoption. During the weeks leading up to RC5 we received a steady stream of bug reports from vendors such as IBM, BEA, JBOSS, Cape Clear, and SAS who are planning to base products on WTP 1.0. The development team addressed the most serious of these bugs, and more fixes will be forthcoming in the mid-February WTP 1.0.1 maintenance release which will follow shortly on the heels of Eclipse 3.1.2.

For more some high-level prespectives on WTP 1.0, check out the Eclipse Foundation press release.

This release is a very significant point in the history of the WTP project since it marks the first introduction of platform APIs. The WTP project aims to satisfy the requirements of both application developers and tool vendors. Platform APIs are key to tool vendor success. WTP needs to provide a comprehensive set of APIs so tool vendors can extend it to support commercial application servers and into non-J2EE domains. For example, we've already talked with other projects who are extending WTP for PHP and AJAX. These APIs need to be stable from release to release so that plug-ins won't break with WTP upgrades. Evolving APIs in a non-breaking way is technically very challenging, but absolutely essential for WTP success. Our first test will be to support Java EE 5 in WTP 1.5 which is part of the Eclipse 3.2 Callisto train arriving at a station near you this summer.

posted Wednesday, 21 December 2005
tags: wtp  10  api