Salesforce.com yesterday announced that it has joined the Eclipse Foundation and made available a AppExchange Toolkit for Eclipse. Consisting of several plugins that run on Eclipse and the Eclipse Web Tools Project (WTP), the Toolkit let developers introspect the salesforce data model, make SOQL queries, edit sControls, and access salesforce help files -- all from within the Eclipse environment. The Toolkit also is pre-integrated with our AJAX toolkit.

Developers can now do all their edits to AppExchange, directly from the leading open IDE on the market. This means that while you're editing sControls or building SOQL queries, you get for free Eclipse features such as syntax checking, highlighting, refactoring, code completion, and so on. This release makes Eclipse the de facto standard for any Java developer who wants to extend salesforce.com or to develop for the AppExchange. Conversely, it makes AppExchange the single easiest on-demand environment for any Eclipse developer to work in. And with all the interesting things happening in Eclipse around PHP and AJAX, this announcement may soon have implications beyond Java. The Toolkit is already providing a productivity boost to salesforce.com's internal development, professional services, and sales engineering teams, and we think it'll have the same impact with our customer and partner developers.

You can download the plug-ins at Eclipse's built in Update Site feature; if you know how to use Update Sites, you can download the toolkit by adding an Update Site here.

The announcement has also gotten some nice press coverage. News.com/CNET placed our announcement as the lead news coming out of EclipseCon. The Register emphasizes the significance of AJAX to the AppExchange devleoper community. CRN highlights the importance of this announcement for systems integrators. And Techtarget claims that this announcement shows how much Eclipse has matured.

Update: The AppExchange Toolkit for Eclipse supports Eclipse versions 3.1.1 and 3.1.2.