The Eclipse Target Management Project just released its M6 Milestone (downloads | update site). Given that you have Eclipse 3.3M6 installed, it will also be available from the Europa Discovery Site shortly.
Top news besides lots of refactoring and API cleanup is that the RSE Eclipse Filesystem (EFS) integration has been promoted from "experimental" to "stable". It allows taking any remote file system available through RSE (like the ssh, ftp and dstore connections) and making it available as resources in the Eclipse Workspace. By sitting at the heart of the Eclipse Resource System, the full power of Eclipse - including source parsers, outline views, content assist and the like - comes to remote files as well.
Although quite a few EFS implementations have been around so far, Target Management / RSE is the first one that solves the problem of logging in to remote systems and keeping credentials in a usable UI. We'll continue working on the integration as described on plan item 170916 in order to iron out final issues and further improve performance.
EFS is a great concept of making the Eclipse Workspace more flexible, but components and plugins need to be aware that the resources they work on can now be remote as well. Work is going on through Platform Plan Item 154126, similar work items in CDT and other tools to improve their EFS integration. Up to now, however, this work has been hard tue to a lack of good EFS implementations. We hope that the new Target Management / RSE EFS implementation will help foster the adoption of EFS in the committer and plugin provider communities.
If you want to learn more about the Eclipse Target Management Project, your perfect choice of getting first-hand information about it is the upcoming Webinar hosted by the Eclipse Foundation on Thursday April 12 at 8am PDT / 11:00 am EDT / 3:00 pm UTC. In 45 minutes, you'll get an intro on the TM concepts and architecture, see an online demo, learn about upcoming plans, and get the chance to ask the TM project leads any questions you have.
Note added on 17-Apr-2007: The TM EFS Provider was fixed later in order to resolve issues running out of handles on SSH connections. These fixes were released as TM 2.0M6a. Users who already downloaded M6 can easily update out of Eclipse: Choose Help > Software Updates > Manage Configuration, find the "Remote System Explorer" feature, choose Scan for Updates.
