ILOG has just introduced its new Business Rule Studio Developer Edition (BR Studio). Built entirely on the Eclipse IDE and based on ILOG JRules, BR Studio will, for the first time, provide Java software developers with the opportunity to develop business rule technology using the Eclipse IDE.

Aonix, an independent global company delivering complete solutions for safety- and mission-critical applications, has joined Eclipse. In addition to porting its Ada95, PERC and Ameos tool suites to the Eclipse platform, Aonix plans to deliver an Eclipse-based IDE.

Instantiations has begun shipping WindowBuilder, a new line of GUI construction tools for Java. This Java-based development suite is the first enterprise development product to support both the Eclipse-based standard widget toolkit (SWT) and Sun's Swing component technology in a single solution.

New research from Evans Data Corp. has found that Eclipse, the open source Java IDE, is experiencing very strong growth in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and Asia Pacific (APAC) as well in North America. In APAC, the survey findings show a more than 70% increase in developers using Eclipse as their primary Java development environment. In EMEA that number has increased by more than 60% and in North America development to the IDE has increased by more than 90%.

Already the contributor of a significant amount of technology to Eclipse.org, IBM now intends over time to align its entire line of Rational development tools with the Eclipse framework.

Here's what's being said and written about Eclipse right now, culled by our editors from a variety of different sources for your reading convenience...

'The first Eclipse drop of spring contains a veritable shower of new features,' gushes the official download site for the latest Eclipse build, version 3.0 M8, released March 26.

This week, LynuxWorks introduced the new LynuxWorks Eclipse-based IDE. A Linux and Solaris-based development environment, it's powered by the Eclipse platform and provides developers of LynuxWorks' BlueCat Linux with complete control over creating, editing, compiling, managing, and debugging C/C++ and Java embedded and real-time applications.

The following letter was sent by Sun to the Eclipse board and membership on January 29, 2004 and then posted on January 30 as an open letter. We bring it here in full.

Novell says it's going to join the Java-based open source Eclipse IDE-for-tools initiative, which is about to be spun off from IBM, and standardize on the development environment in the name of uniformity and efficiency. Basically it's mimicking IBM.

Wind River Systems, the embedded operating system house that bought Berkeley Software Design Inc (BSDi), the 10-year attempt to commercialize Berkeley Unix, an adventure that doesn't seem to have netted the company much, has joined the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL).

Apparently the open source Eclipse consortium will be reconsidering the royalty-free access to API memorialized in its Common Public License (CPL). Smaller companies want to be paid for their IP.