Eclipse proponents presenting at the show on Thursday discussed projects slated for June 2007 release. That is when "Europa," which features a coordinated release of multiple Eclipse projects, is due. Europa is the follow-up to Callisto.

Details of the next major release of the Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP) project were aired. WTP provides tools for developing standards-based, multi-tier Java Web applications. It features tools for HTML, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), JavaScript, XML, Web services and other technologies.

Due to be a part of Europa, WTP 2.0 is expected to accommodate Web 2.0 concepts and Java Enterprise Edition 5, according to IBM Rational's Arthur Ryman, who is Eclipse Web Tools lead at the company. WTP 2.0 will incorporate the Eclipse AJAX Tools Framework as well as Eclipse's JavaServer Faces Tools and Dali projects. Dali features tools compliant with the Java Persistence Architecture, for persisting of objects into relational databases. The Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0 specification is supported in Dali.

Technologies from Eclipse PHP Tools Project, including improved Apache Web server support, and the SOA Tools Platform project, which has improved Web services support, also will be in WTP 2.0. Overlap with the Eclipse Data Tools Project will be eliminated in version 2.0.

In the meantime, WTP version 1.5.1 and 1.5.2 are expected in late-September and February as maintenance releases to fix bugs in Callisto.