The Eclipse Foundation, an open source community focused on building an open software development platform, has announced the unveiling of its annual coordinated project release.

Codenamed Europa, the offering features 21 Eclipse projects for software developers and is more than double the size of last year's release.

Europa consists of more than 17 million lines of code and the contributions of over 310 open source developers located in 19 countries.

The 2006 release, codenamed Callisto, involved 10 project teams, seven million lines of code and 260 open source developers in 12 countries.

This is the fourth year in a row that the Eclipse community has shipped a major release on schedule.

Europa includes runtime technology for creating server applications, developer tools for service oriented architecture, tools for improving team collaboration and support for users of the popular Ruby programming language.

Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, said that the "tremendous" advantage Eclipse provides is that it spans these different types of applications with a common component model, frameworks and tools.

"The Eclipse Europa release is an important milestone for fulfilling our community's strategy of providing a common development platform for embedded, rich client, rich internet and server applications," he said.