The Eclipse Foundation kicked off its third annual EclipseCon 2006 user conference at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, Calif. This year's show is the largest gathering yet of the vibrant and active Eclipse community. The conference has attracted 46 exhibitors and 10 open source projects and features over 140 technical sessions. Industry keynotes will be delivered by luminaries such as Borland CEO Tod Nielsen, Greg Stein of Apache Software Foundation, Joel Spolsky of the popular "Joel on Software" site and Eclipse's own Director of Committer Community Development and wiki founder Ward Cunningham.

"The Eclipse platform owes its widespread adoption and pervasiveness in such a short period to the active and vibrant Eclipse community," stated Mike Milinkovich, executive director, Eclipse Foundation. "EclipseCon 2006 brings this community together and provides member companies the opportunity to show off their new and enhanced Eclipse-based solutions. These solutions demonstrate the commitment among community members to expand the Eclipse ecosystem into commercial adoption."

EclipseCon 2006 is the pre-eminent gathering of Eclipse developers, members and organizations using and deploying Eclipse-based technologies. The show also provides a forum to discuss key issues facing the community and to hear about developments to come in 2006. Attendees will be looking behind the scenes at the latest developments in Eclipse projects such as the Rich Client Platform (RCP), Application Lifecycle Framework (ALF), Web Tools Platform (WTP), Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) and the Eclipse Platform.

Eclipse member companies are using the conference to unveil a number of announcements, including:

-- Accelerated Technology announced its EDGE Tool Suite, based on Eclipse 3.1. EDGE version 1.2 suite provides an integrated tool solution that includes an IDE, debugger, profiler, compiler, UML tools, JTAG connection device and prototyping tools. The tool suite supports the ARM, MicroBlaze, MIPS, Nios II and PowerPC family of processors. See www.mentor.com/products/embedded_software/development_tools/ nuc_edge/index.cfm.