Java News from Tuesday, June 14, 2005

The Eclipse Project has posted the second release candidate 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, quick fixes for serial version IDs, and support for Java 1.5.

The release notes for this build haven't been posted yet. However I did notice that some of the menus have been reorganized a bit, and when I put the cursor in an identifier in Java code, Eclipse highlights that identifier in yellow, and all other occurrences of the same thing. It was a little distracting at first. I'm not sure if I like this feature or not. Maybe it will grow on me. If it doesn't I suppose there's a checkbox to turn it off somewhere. This release also feels faster than M7/RC1, which felt quite slow to me compared to earlier versions. This is all subjective. No hard numbers here.