Eclipse Challenges Visual Studio.Net In Europe, Other RegionsEclipse Challenges Visual Studio.Net In Europe, Other Regions

The adoption rate of Eclipse, an open-source integrated development environment, has more than doubled in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, making it the first integrated development environment to challenge Microsoft's Visual Studio.Net, a market research firm said.

Eclipse is now used by a third of developers in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, according to an annual survey of nearly 400 developers conducted this year by Evans Data Corp. In addition, use of the set of plug-ins needed to develop rich-client applications, collectively called the Eclipse Rich Client Platform, is expected to triple within the next two years. The platform enables developers to write an application once and run it on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux.

"These results are reflective of the overall market adoption we are seeing for Eclipse adoption globally," John Andrews, president of Evans Data said Monday in a statement.

The survey also found that 42% of developers in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa use XML, or extensible markup language.

Meanwhile, the Eclipse Foundation on Monday launched Mylar 1.0, a task-focused user interface for the Eclipse IDE. The tool is meant to reduce the amount of searching, scrolling, and navigation developers do in seeking information while building applications. Developers often are dealing with millions of lines of code and thousands of elements in large projects

Mylar, which integrates with task repositories, such as Bugzilla, Trac, and JIRA, filters and ranks information by monitoring a programmer's activity and extracting the structural relationships of program artifacts. Results are integrated with other development environment features, such as structure display, search, and change management.