tOMPSON’s blog

Today Eclipse Europa was released. Eclipse Europa is the name for Eclipse IDE 3.3 and a set of other compatible Eclipse projects. With last years release Callisto the Eclipse team tried to make it easier for users to find the right plugin versions for their Eclipse installation. The Callisto update site allowed to install many other projects from eclipse.org (WTP, VE, BIRT, …). This was a great improvement.

With Europe they went one step further. When downloading Eclipse the user may choose from five different base packages:

I downloaded version for Java EE Developers from a German mirror, unzipped it and had the complete environment with WTP 2.0 up and running. In former versions I always had to install WTP manually through the update wizard or by downloading the required packages.

Before I started Eclipse I looked into the eclipse.ini file and was very happy – the default memory settings for the VM in which Eclipse runs is set to 512 megs and the MaxPermSize setting is there to. In earlier versions you had to add the setting if you are using Sun JDK (see earlier posts).

So much for the version released today. I am using Eclipse 3.3 milestone and release candidate versions now for about two months and here is a list of which of the things I like most:

1. Save Actions
   This is definitive one of my favorites. When working in large teams with repositories it is essential to have a common code formatter to avoid checkin’s of format differences. I made it to a habit of mine pressing always Ctrl-Shift-F before saving a file but it happens that team members forget to not do this. Save Actions allow to configure which things are done automatically when saving a file – I think formatting and organizing imports is a must (minimizes warnings too).
2. Clean Up profile
   With Eclipse 3.3 it is possible to define profiles for the clean up action like you can do for the code style formatter. This allows you do define team wide settings for code clean ups. Again this minimizes differences between checked in code of team members.
3. Improved compare view
   Another great improvement that safes time when working with CVS repositories: when comparing differences between files the compare view shows which symbols changed in a line. This makes it much easier to find out what the real changes in a file are.
4. Easy way to stop console from popping up
   Sometimes it is really annoying that the console always pops up when something is written to the standard or error out. Now two small buttons allow to switch these behavior off and on – nice!
   

I could continue with this list and maybe I will in one of my next posts. There are so many other things like improved library handling in WTP, Ant 1.7 with support for JUnit 4 and so on.

The only bad experiences I had so far were:

1. Spell checking for extreme large XML files does decrease productivity. I turned it off.
2. Checking the option for generating a serial version ID in the clean up dialog prevents the clean up run from coming to an end.
3. I had problems with installing Subclipse because a required feature is missing in the Java EE package.

All in all I can not wait for doing my projects with this shiny new version of Eclipse – thanks to the Eclipse team!

Eclipse, Java