Eclipse Che 5.0 Announced at CheConf 2016

When we launched Eclipse Che in January, appetite for a seamless, portable development workspace was immediately apparent. In this short time, a robust community of developers and partners have transformed Che into one of the fastest-growing open source projects, with 600,000 usage hours in the last two months, 100,000 hours last week, hundreds of thousands of downloads and over 70 contributors, 3,300 GitHub stars and 550 forks on GitHub. Major industry players have adopted Che as the base for their developer products: Codenvy was the first, followed soon after by SAP, Red Hat, Bitnami and Samsung. As of today, that list includes Docker, which announced it is joining the Eclipse Foundation to work directly with Che to further its breadth and reach.

This rich ecosystem is only poised to grow with the launch of Eclipse Che 5.0, announced today at Che’s user conference, to make it even easier for anyone, anywhere, to contribute to a project. As individuals, teams and enterprises recognize the value of open source cloud development, we’re excited to see what the community does next with Che 5.0.

Announcing Che 5.0

Eclipse Che 5.0 is in active development with milestones released every two weeks. The final shipped version is expected before the end of the year. New features include:

• Docker Compose Workspaces. A Che developer workspace can run multiple machines with support for Docker Compose files and standard Dockerfiles.

• “Dev Mode” a Production Runtime. Che takes a production image, mounts the source code inside, adds the artifact repository and then injects agents for SSH, terminal or intellisense. This virtually eliminates surprise production deployment problems.
• Workspace Agents. Instantly and dynamically inject developer services like language intellisense, SSH and terminal access directly from the workspace.
• Stack Editor. Create custom runtimes for Che workspaces based on your software and environments and control the agents and resources they require.

• Eclipse Che on OpenShift. Che will support running on OpenShift including distributing workspace runtimes to operate as OpenShift pods. This will complement our existing OpenShift plugin for deploying your projects to OpenShift.
• Docker Store Certification. Codenvy and Docker have worked closely over six months to certify Eclipse Che for the Docker Store with enterprise support. The Docker Store advertises software vetted for quality, security and enterprise-readiness.
• Expanded PHP Support. Syntax validation, auto-complete, search and debugging have been added for PHP, making Che the most powerful browser-based IDE solution for PHP developers.

• Open Language Server Protocol. Eclipse Che and Microsoft Visual Studio Code are the first IDEs to support the language server protocol that Codenvy, Red Hat and Microsoft announced in June. Today, available language servers include JSON, CSharp, Java and now PHP. Language servers provided by Sourcegraph for Go, Python, JavaScript and Typescript are planned to support the protocol by Q1 of next year.
• Chedir For Reproducible Workspaces. Developer workspaces with built-in editor and tools can be started in any cloned repository by typing “che dir up” then shared with other developers.
• Desktop IDE Compatibility. You can live sync workspaces and projects to desktops for use with local IDEs. Combined with a specialized unison sync agent and a fuse-base file system, syncing is fast and seamless.
• Che Providers. To facilitate custom Che assemblies (products) operating at scale, Che will support providers that standardize how custom assemblies can run, operate and manage Che instances. This includes adding in automation for backup and recovery, offline installation, monitoring and configuration management.
• Codenvy Dockerized. Similar to SAP and Samsung ARTIK, Codenvy is certifying its on-premises offering as a Che Provider. As part of the conversion, Codenvy is now Dockerized, running clusters of workspaces using Docker, Docker Swarm and Docker Compose.

What’s Next

Over 2,000 developers and partners attended CheConf today. They came from 90 countries and 800 companies. We are excited by the community’s rapid growth and continued innovation as we realize our vision to create a lightweight workspace server that runs for every product, every server and every user.

Che is an open project and together, we are fundamentally changing how development is done. Check out Eclipse Che, try out the new features and see how to get involved with contributions.