Java News from Sunday, November 7, 2004

The Eclipse Project has posted the third milestone of Eclipse 3.1, 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. The main new features in 3.1 are Ant 1.6.2, quick fixes for serial version IDs, and some (still incomplete) support for Java 1.5. New features in this milestone include:

• Flagging of references to classes in the sun and com.sun packages
• New quick assists include convert between ? operator and if-else statement, invert a conditional expression, introduce a new local variable after an instanceof check, and break out a substring literal, (though why anyone would need to do that, or need an assist if they dud, I can't imagine.)
• Flagging of @see and @link tags that reference deprecated and inaccessible elements
• More Java 5 features including enumerations, static imports, generics, and varargs
• New refactorings including Convert Anonymous Class to Nested and move instance method,
• The locks owned by a thread as well as the lock a thread is waiting for can both be displayed inline in the Debug view.
• When you linger over a key for an externalized string in the Java editor, the associated externalized value is shown in a hover.
• Copy and paste a stack trace into the Java Stack Trace Console and use hyperlinks to navigate the trace.
• The debugger can display the toString()-computed value of a variable can be displayed inline in the Variables view tree, as well as in the details area.
• Breakpoint groups support nested groups and prevent the loss of user defined groups when the group settings are changed in the Breakpoints view.
• CTRL+Z (Windows) and CTRL+D (Linux) are recognized as EOF in the console.
• The console character encoding can be configured on a per-launch basis.
• The runtime supports a new plug-in format that houses all of the plug-in's files - code, resources, plug-in manifest - in a single JAR file, rather than in a directory.
• The PDE can launch an Eclipse application at development time with the same custom configuration file (config.ini) you plan to deploy with your application.
• Hyperlink navigation in ant editor
• In the Ant editor, place your the on the name of an Ant task, type, etc. and press SHIFT+F2 to open a browser on the relevant page in the Ant manual. (Yeah, like I can remember that. It's been known for at leats 20 years that menus outperform keyboard shortcuts.)
• It is now possible to create resources in Eclipse with names containing colon (':') and backslash ('\') characters on Linux.
• SWT's support for bidirectional languages has been extended up into JFace and the workbench.
• The JFace TableViewer widget now supports the SWT.VIRTUAL flag, which only creates table items as they are needed to reduce the number of operating system resources required for long tables.