Eclipse Europe released

As promised, Eclipse Europe has again been released on nearly the last day in June. The full stack of the Europe Project contains an astonishing 17 million lines of code! Wauw! As we might expect from Eclipse, this release is packed again with some great features.

About Europe

The biggest change in Eclipse Europe is the further evolution of the Callisto project: delivering a coordinated release with numerous eclipse projects, reducing version incompatibilities and make the entire platform better then ever. This year, Eclipse releases an amazing 21 projects.

What else

After installing, which took 2min to extract, the first thing you notice is the new eyecandy. More colors, more icons and some changes to the default perspectives show that we are working with the brand new version. It feels still like Eclipse though.

A visual change you really need to get used to, is the new tree animation. When entering subfolders, the tree automatically shift to the left, to let you see more of the tree on the right. It’s rather annoying at first, but helps keeping a cleared view.

Another strange feature, is the spell checker in comments. While spell checking is great, since you haven’t got the option to ignore certain words, it becomes irritating fast. I’m missing the option to right click on certain words and having the option to ignore the spelling of the word.

Some new refactoring stuff has been added. (add parameterobject, Fix Deprecation, Replace Invocation). Always good to have.

More shortcuts (Ctrl+1 for instance).

WTP 2.0. This provides following features:

• Better support for JSP tag files.
• Better HTML and JSP formatting when requesting a “format everything” (CTRL-SHIFT-F)
• Better publishing performance.
• Supports Axis2 out of the box

You can now search on package name aswell. For instance *springframework*Listener would return all listeners within the springframework.

You can now let Eclipse use Firefox as default rendering of webpages.

Text Drag&Drop! Now this seems stupid, but eliminates a lot of the cut and past for small stuff. Reorder the parameter list? Drag and Drop them!

Maximizing windows work a lot better. Creates nice sidebars.

Final Thought

As you can tell, Eclipse 3.3 is another great tool. In this small review I scratched only the top of what this new release holds. All the features I mentioned are just what we developers are likely to see right away. But the real power of Eclipse Europe is the work that went into making the platform easier to expand. We will see some great new plugins really soon, that will work a lot better with each other.

So to keep it short and simple: Eclipse Rox!