The development field got an infusion of new tools this week, with major releases from Eclipse, Sun Microsystems and CodeGear targeting hot technologies. Dynamic languages developers received new IDEs (integrated development environments) from the Eclipse Foundation's PHP Development Tools (PDT) project and CodeGear's cleverly named 3rd Rail, a toolkit for Ruby on Rails development. Meanwhile, Sun launched version 2 of its GlassFish open-source application server and the beta version of NetBean 6, Sun's Java development IDE.
CodeGear, formerly Borland, hopes to revitalize the commercial IDE market by targeting emerging platforms like Ruby on Rails, an open-source framework popular among Web developers. Previewed in May, 3rdRail includes code refactoring, navigation and completion tools, along with a complete stack of deployment technology. Priced at $299 and available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, 3rdRail's technology bundle includes the MySQL database a developer license for CodeGear's InterBase database.
