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.

A survey from the Eclipse Foundation, which oversees development of the open source Eclipse IDE, shows that 32.7 percent of respondents use Linux as their primary desktop development system, up almost 6 points from 2009. Meanwhile, Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distro among Eclipse developers.

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.

The Eclipse Foundation has launched a project to develop an open-source runtime that would provide developers with a more flexible way to use components to build software for mobile, desktop and server systems. The new, top-level Eclipse Runtime project aims to develop a new runtime based on Equinox, an existing Eclipse lightweight OSGi-based runtime. The new top-line project will link together various Eclipse subgroups, including Eclipse Communication Framework, EclipseLink, Equinox, Rich Ajax Platform, Riena and Swordfish.

Google and the Eclipse Foundation have announced the launch of Eclipse Labs, a Google hosted portal that will feature open source projects based on the Eclipse platform

This article describes the various refactorings available in Eclipse Java™ Development Tools (JDT), including what each refactoring does, when to use it, and how to use it. It also explores the refactoring script functionality in Eclipse, which allows library developers to share code refactorings with their clients.

The Eclipse Foundation has announced the creation of a new SOA Industry Working Group, whose founding members include the Engineering Group from Italy, Germany company itemis, French firm Obeo and Sopera

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 Eclipse Foundation has announced the winners of this year's annual Eclipse Community Awards at the EclipseCon 2010 conference. The awards recognise the top individuals, projects and technologies in the Eclipse ecosystem