Today at EclipseCon, the Eclipse Foundation announced the release of Eclipse Che 4.0, the first public release of the Eclipse Che cloud IDE workspace server and universal web based IDE. Tyler Jewell gave the opening keynote at EclipseCon talking about the evolution and the future of IDEs, demonstrating how Eclipse Che can be used to provide a distributed workspace requiring only a browser on the client in order to be able to code.
Tyler Jewell, Eclipse Che project lead and Codenvy CEO described the goal of the project as:
Eclipse Che is moving development forward with a universal workspace. By making workspaces portable, they can relocate anywhere, giving development teams on-demand environments that can be part of an agile process.
Codenvy has been developing a web-based IDE for some time, and the core was donated the code base to the Eclipse foundation in Summer 2014. Since then, other commercial partners have joined in the Eclipse Che project, including Microsoft, Red Hat and SAP. Others have been enthusiastically trying it out, including Vaadin, IBM's Bluemix DevOps Services, SmartBear, SourceGraph, Tomitribe and eXo Platform.
Eclipse Che provides a collaborative workspace server, which allows programmers to share workspaces as well as develop code individually, allowing individuals and teams to work together on shared or individual projects. These are exposed by a REST framework, which allows either a traditional desktop IDE to communicate with and use the workspace data remotely, or through a JavaScript Cloud IDE front-end requiring nothing but a web browser on the client side.
Eclipse Che also ships with a plug-in framework, which allows extensions to be written, uploaded, and installed into the server. This includes the provision of stacks, which allow different languages and tools to be added to the framework.
Eclipse Che has been designed using Docker as the run-time image format, which means that getting started with Eclipse Che is trivial; the Getting Started page shows how to either install the product directly or using Docker to launch the Che runtime image codenvy/che.
Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation, said that:
Eclipse Che is rethinking the way IDEs are built and used by developers. It uses Docker, Java and JavaScript to create a more flexible and dynamic developer work experience. The initial feedback on Eclipse Che has been outstanding. The number of downloads and external contributions all point to Che being an incredibly successful open source project.
Eclipse Che can be downloaded from the Eclipse Che page, and the source code is developed in the open on GitHub. There’s an extensive set of documentation available as well as a blog that contains more information about the project.