Java News from Thursday, May 17, 2007

The Eclipse Project has posted the seventh milestone of Eclipse 3.3, 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. New features in this release. mostly minor, include:

• Drag & drop and clipboard operations now work on Vista WPF.
• To quickly access UI elements such as views, commands, preference pages, and others, use the new Quick Access dialog, available under Window > Navigation and bound to Ctrl+3 by default
• Dragging external files (i.e., from the Windows file explorer) on to the editor area of a workbench window has the same effect as Open File.
• Words can now be selected using double-click + mouse move. (Why isn't a double click enough?)
• An American and a British English dictionary are now part of the SDK. Spell checking is enabled by default.
• Ant 1.7
• Introduce Parameter Object refactoring
• Quick Fix to create and use getter and setter
• Runtime type generation
• Java 6 annotation processing

Personally I'm about ready to give up on Eclipse. 3.2 introduced major crippling bugs that have been unresolved for over a year now, and there seems to be no effort toward fixing these. On top of that, it has major flaws integrating with the Mac; and there seems to be little interest in fixing those either. IBM has made the same mistake with SWT that Sun made with the AWT and Swing years ago: thinking that multiplatform means Windows+Unix. It doesn't. Sun has learned its lesson. IBM hasn't. Perhaps it's time to give Netbeans a chance, speaking of which,

Sun's posted the ninth milestone of NetBeans 6.0, its pure Java IDE for various platforms. Additions include:

• All NetBeans 6.0 components are available in one installer.
• Form Editor supports Java Desktop applications development including database binding
• JavaScript support
• Ruby support (but it's not open source :-( )