Java News from Saturday, February 19, 2005

The Eclipse Project has posted the fifth milestone of Eclipse 3.1, an open source integrated development environment (IDE) for Java. Eclipse 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 SWT features in this milestone include:

• The Tree widget can display multiple columns by creating TreeColumn objects.
• Reorderable table columns
• Windows XP look and feel for Buttons
• HTTPS navigation
• A "New API has been added for advanced graphics operations such as path for curves and lines, alpha blending and transformations. This new API requires the Cairo Vector engine on GTK and Motif and GDI+ on Windows."
• A new Link widget that displays text containing hyperlinks.

Signifcant Java IDE enhancements include:

• CVS updates are no longer package deep. For example, I can now commit nu.xom without committing changes made in nu.xom.canonical, nu.xom.xslt, nu.xom.xinclude, and so forth.
• A Breakpoints view that groups debugger "breakpoints by type, project, file, or working sets, and supports nested groupings. You can use breakpoint working sets to group breakpoints into problem-specific sets that can be quickly enabled and disabled as a whole."
• Find variables
• Boxing/unboxing diagnosis
• Search works better with generics
• Improved Java 1.5 support for refactorings, source actions, and syntax highlighting
• Folded code has more descriptive captions
• Header comments and copyright statements in Java source files are now folded