Java News from Tuesday, November 8, 2005

The Eclipse Project has posted the third milestone of Eclipse 3.2, 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. This release adds support for OpenGL in SWT, buttons with image and text, many text layout improvements, a hierarchical problem view mode, better Java project import, and various other improvements. I installed the Windows version, and it seems to work. I'm not sure I'd rush out to upgrade yet, but if you need to put a version on a new system, I don't see any particular reason to use an earlier version. Eclispe milestone releases feel pretty stable, and don't have a big history of breaking existing functionality. (Famous last words, I know.)