Java News from Thursday, July 17, 2008

Apple has released version 3.1 of Xcode, "Apple's tool suite and integrated development environment (IDE) for creating Mac OS X Universal Binaries that run natively on PowerPC and Intel-based Macintosh computers. The IDE provides a powerful user interface to many industry-standard and open-source tools, including GCC, javac, jikes, and GDB. Xcode is designed to fully support the Carbon and Cocoa frameworks and Java. It contains templates for creating applications, frameworks, libraries, plug-ins, Java applications and applets, and command-line tools. Developers can use Xcode to construct a user interface, test code performance, and perform many other common development tasks." New features in this release include:

Xcode and its updates are free beer. With Mac OS X, Apple wisely stopped charging for developer tools. You'll still need an ADC membership (including the free membership) to get a copy.