Java News from Saturday, February 14, 2004

The Eclipse Project has posted the seventh milestone beta of Eclipse 3.0, an open source integrated development environment (IDE) for Java. It also doubles as a base platform for your own applications, an alternative to the AWT and Swing, and a powerful floor wax and dessert topping. My personal favorite new features in M7 are:

• Standalone ("double-clickable") Mac OS X applications can be generated with a new export wizard. (Very cool! I need this.)
• Improved string compare in JUnit view (Very useful. I often find myself inserting break points and echo print statements just to figure out how two strings mismatch.)
• Background workspace auto-refresh (disabled by default, but useful enough to make me turn it on)
• Launch configurations are now updated as a consequence of Java source code refactorings such as renaming a Java project, source file, or type declaration.

Other new features since milestone 6 include

• SWT-level content assist has been enhanced for various widgets. Concrete Configurable tab width for text editors An experimental search view that runs searches in the background and shows the results in either tree or table form.
• The old Source > Comment (Ctrl+/) and Source > Uncomment (Ctrl+\) commands in the Java editor have been replaced by the Source > Toggle Comment (Ctrl+Shift+C) command that uncomments the currently selected source lines if all of them are commented and comments them otherwise.
• Quick outline shows inherited members
• Sticky occurrence annotations
• Mark locations of thrown exceptions
• Template mode coloring is more customizable
• Multiple annotations shown in roll-over hover
• Activity-based help filtering
• Content assist in dialog fields
• The type hierarchy opened on packages (F4) now also shows interfaces of this package.
• PDE computes plug-in build class paths dynamically
• A new Configuration tab of Runtime Workbench launch configurations allows advanced users to choose which plug-ins start automatically.
• The PDE Error Log view now lets you inspect the full details of an event, and easily navigate from one event to the next.
• Preview of new look for workbench
• New API to act on views
• Progress on progress
• Pop-ups for inspect/display
• The ability to launch a Java program from the context menu in the Package Explorer is back.
• Step into Selection on any line
• Java launch configurations now have an entry for the default project classpath.
• The Java debugger now uses invented names like "arg1", "arg2", etc. to show method parameter variables when the real names are unavailable from the class file.
• Ant 1.6 support
• Formatter for Ant buildfiles

Still no code folding though. :-( This is one of the very few advantages other IDEs have over Eclipse.