Eclipse Helios Preview for Java Developers

The final release of the new Eclipse 3.6 - Helios is coming close on June 23. Here is a short overview of some of the new features for Java developers.

Open Implementation
Open Implementation, which was available by holding Ctrl and hovering over a method in the editor, is now also available in the navigate menu and can be bound to a keyboard shortcut (e.g. F4?).

Expressions View
When debugging, it's now easier to add expressions in the expressions view and the expressions view has now columns

Breakpoints View
The breakpoint view now provides the possibility to quickly edit some properties of the breakpoint, e.g. breakpoint condition.

Dragging and linking files from operating system
You can now drag files from the operating system into the package explorer and instead of copying them there you can create just links. This feature is definitely useful in a lot of cases.

Move Type to New File Refactoring
Convert Member to Top Level Type has been renamed to Move Type to New File.

Javadoc includes annotations
This is a feature I've been waiting for quite long. The JavaDoc hovers now include information about annotations.

Eclipse Galileo Release

The upcoming Eclipse Galileo Release is currently in RC state. This post highlights some of the new features.

Update-Manager
Finally, the update manager works again. With the Ganymede release I really had huge problems to install updates, both on my working machine and my personal machine. Mostly because of some strange error messages. In Galileo the update manager works fine and its design has been improved.

Tabbing
One thing that always bothered me in previous versions of Eclipse was an issue with tabbing through opened editors by hitting Ctrl+PgUp/PgDown. As soon as you tabbed into an tab which itself had multiple tabs (such as the XML editor has a source tab and a design tab) you simply could not tab further outside of this tab.

Now this works fine. Within an editor with multiple tabs you can tab through the tabs with Alt+PgUp/PgDown.

toString() generation
Another nice thing is, that you can generate toString() automatically from the source menu.
The dialog lets you customize the way in which it's generated with different aspects: the fields to be included, the template to be used, a style (String concatenation, StringBuilder, String.format, ...) and other options (e.g. null-value handling).



Open Type
The "Open Type" dialog (Ctrl+T) allows for searching by type name patterns, e.g. the camel case letters. That's not new. But now these pattern latters are highlighted. The "Open Resource" dialog does not support this feature, though.


Rectangular selection
Editors now support rectangular selection. Press Alt+Shift+A to activate. Might be helpful in some situations.

Rename via Quick fix
Rename refactoring is available via Quick fix (Ctrl+1).


Constructor auto completion
The auto completion feature now is able to show all available constructors of a class. Before, only the type was available for selection.



Support for inheritDoc
The JavaDoc view now support the inheritDoc tag.



Mylyn planning icon
This is a minor one. Mylyn makes it easier to set the scheduling of a task by adding a button to the task editor's toolbar.



Compare View
In the Compare Editor many enhancements have been made, but I haven't had a deeper look at these. New Features include some of the features of the Java Editor, including auto completion, hyperlinking, java doc on hover, go to line and quick outline.

Patch pasting
Sounds nice, but haven't tried it yet: It's possible to apply a patch by simply pasting in the project explorer.

Still Line Break Issues
One thing that not has been fixed, is that sometimes when Generics are used, the formatter does not break the line even if it contains more characters than the maximum allowed.

won an eclipse t-shirt

for its latest release (ganymede) the eclipse foundation started a contest. they gave away eclipse t-shirts for the first reviews of the new release and i've won one for my post in this blog.

thanks to eclipse. this is my first developer t-shirt.

eclipse ganymede release

last week i downloaded a release candidate version of the new eclipse ganymede release and today the final version is coming out. i've downloaded the big bundle including modelling tools.

i like the new modelling features, especially because i've been waiting so long for some (free) support in that area in eclipse. all the uml plugins i've tried so far were either quite limited in their functionality or their usability. but now all sorts of uml diagrams are supported, e.g. class diagrams, activity diagrams, use case diagrams, etc. What's missing are some kind of reverse engineering features and sequence diagrams (or i haven't found them yet).

the new breadcrumbs feature shows the path to the current item at the top of the editor. it's like project -> src folder -> package -> class -> class member. each of these crumbs has a context menu which shows other items at the chosen level. i think that's quite nice, as it allows more context-sensitive working like mylyn task focussing, which makes it easier to find items than in the package/project explorer.

javascript support has been greatly improved. it now offers many features known from the java perspective. For example you can follow function calls by pressing F3 oder holding Ctrl and clicking on a method call. you can display the call hierarchy of functions and there is refactoring support, e.g. renaming functions.

one thing i'm still waiting for is a mylyn feature that allows for creating reports, e.g. a report that lists all completed tasks per week with estimated time and actual time. sadly, mylyn hasn't been improved that much, i think. but still it's a great feature.

these are just some of the new features and improvements. there are many smaller ones, like junit test excectution time, enhanced tooltips (e.g. javadoc on types), autocompletion, subversion support, etc.

one feature i haven't tried out so far is the ECF (eclipse communication framework), but that is one i'll try out for sure. from what i've read, it seems to support remote team collaboration, e.g. to share an editor. that sounds interesting.