Almost three years ago, developerWorks published "Using the Ruby Development Tools plug-in for Eclipse," which introduced some of the features found in the Ruby Development Tools (RDT) plug-in for Eclipse. Current at the time was V0.5. We revisit that tool in this article. Today, RDT is called Aptana RadRails and is available as a plug-in for Aptana Studio or Eclipse.

Acire is a simple little tool that provides a library of Python examples called snippets that outline how to do specific taks. With each snippet you can browse the code, run it and otherwise learn how it works in order to help you get to grips with writing your own programs as quickly and easily as possible.

Eclipse is a new world for Microsoft® Visual Studio® developers, and getting started with Eclipse can be confusing. New concepts, such as plug-in architecture, workspace-centric project structure, and automatic build can seem counterintuitive at first. Learn about these and other differences between the two environments, so that you can begin to feel at home with Eclipse.

As is already indicated by version 0.9, which has just been released, Eclipse 4 will incorporate several familiar web technologies and put them to new uses. The Eclipse development environment has become a very popular open source project.

"XUL Explorer is a XULRunner application that provides an easy way to experiment with XUL. It’s a simple editor that can preview XUL inline or in a separate popup window. It has a list of code snippets (small fragments of XUL or JavaScript) that can be quickly inserted into the editor. The XUL can be loaded from and saved to files.

OSCON 2009 is now drawing to a close, and, before we hop on a flight back to the UK, we spent an hour or two typing up just a few snippets from some of the interviews we conducted at the conference.

The Jetty developers have released version 7 of their popular Java Servlet container. The source code for the new release is available from the Eclipse Foundation under the Eclipse Public Licence (EPL); Jetty 6 continues to be available from the Codehaus project under the Apache 2 license.

The Free Software Foundation and Eclipse Foundation have released guidance on how each organisations licenses, GPL and EPL, interact with each other. At the core of the debate is the question "Can you GPL an Eclipse plug-in?"

IBM expanding its backing for Eclipse with the release of an open source application lifecycle management (ALM) platform serving its Rational tools.