What is the difference between versions of Eclipse (Europa, Helios, Galileo)? Which is the best for desktop application?
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In Galileo and Helios Provisioning Platform were introduced, and non-update-site plugins now should be placed in "dropins" subfolder ("eclipse/dropins/plugin_name/features", "eclipse/dropins/plugin_name/plugins") instead of Eclipse's folder ("eclipse/features" and "eclipse/plugins").
Also for programming needs the best Eclipse is the latest Eclipse. It has too many bugs for now, and all the Eclipse team is now doing is fixing the bugs. There are very few interface enhancements since Europa. IMHO.
Each version has some improvements in certain technologies. For users the biggest difference is whether or not to execute certain plugins, because some were made only for a particular version of Eclipse.
The Eclipse releases are named after the moons of Jupiter, and each denotes a successive release.
Helios is the current release you can download eclipse as your programming needs http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/
Those are just version designations (just like windows xp, vista or windows 7) which they are using to name their major releases, instead of using version numbers. so you'll want to use the newest eclipse version available, which is helios (or 3.6 which is the corresponding version number).
They are successive, improved versions of the same product. Anyone noticed how the names of the last three and the next release are in alphabetical order (Galileo, Helios, Indigo, Juno)? This is probably how they will go in the future, in the same way that Ubuntu release codenames increase alphabetically (note Indigo is not a moon of Jupiter!).
To see a list of the Eclipse release name and it's corresponding version number go to this website. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eclipse_%28software%29#Release
I too dislike the way that the Eclipse foundation DOES NOT use the version number for their downloads or on the Help -> About Eclipse dialog. They do display the version on the download webpage, but the actual file name is something like:
But over time, you forget what release name goes with what version number. I would much prefer a file naming convention like:
This way you get BOTH from the file name and it is sortable in a directory listing. Fortunately, they mostly choose names are alphabetically after the previous one (except for 3.4-Ganymede vs the newer 3.5-Galileo).
Source: Stackoverflow.com