When I first heard the news that the next version of Eclipse (Europa) was released I immediately went over to the website to get the download. The great thing I noticed was the variety of versions that has been bundled and I could quickly get to the version I need which was Europa for JEE and web related development.

After unzipping the download I noticed that Eclipse still does not have an installer. This has not been a problem in the past and simply clicking the eclipse.exe launched the application as before. This is still something I find curious, why does Eclipse not come with an installer?

First impression of Eclipse Europa, well on my 1.8Ghz, 512MB RAM Dell system it loaded in under 20 seconds which is definitely a huge improvement over the current 3.2 version I am running. My first stop was the “What’s New” section. Some of the platform changes that Europa introduces is complete compliance with Windows Vista as far as the win32 version is concerned even going as far as improving painting in double-buffered canvases to be twice as fast. Another feature related to Windows Vista is the port to the WPF platform that comes pre-installed on Windows Vista. The port is still in an exploration phase but is said to be stable enough for exploration and development.

A great new feature that is surely going to save some time is the “Quick Access” dialog. This can be found under Window : Navigation and is bound to the short cut key Ctrl+3 by default. It basically works like the “Find” feature in Eclipse, press Ctrl+3 and start typing the name of the command you want to execute. As you type it will start populating a list of possible matches. Once you see the item you were looking for, either click on it or use your arrow keys to scroll down to the item and hit “Enter” to execute the command. It has even got a memory feature, so the next time you open the dialog your recently used items will be shown. Typing the first few characters of the command will automatically move the selection to one of your stored option. You can also used abbreviations to quickly find statements with a longer name for example, typing in ´swt´ will bring up the option “Surround with try/catch block This is a nifty little feature that I will definitely be using.

Undo support has been extended for most resource actions such as manipulating projects, folders, or files as well as resource creation, deletion, move, copy, and rename. Also for many of your task and bookmark operations there is now the added ability to undo these actions.

Europa also sports some new presentational features. There are now a new bar called a trim. When you minimize a stack it is minimized to the nearest trim. When it is the trim area there are icons for the various items that form part of view stack as well as a restore icon. When you click on one of the view icons the view is rendered in fast view. These minimized stacks can be dragged and dropped to anywhere on the trim. When a view stack is maximized it automatically triggers minimization of all other view stacks to the trim area. Maximizing an editor now maximizes the entire editor area, allowing you to view multiple editors side-by-side while maximized. You can switch back to the old presentation by going to General : Appearance. From what I have seen, I do not think many will be switching back.

Workspace switching has also been improved. When switching workspaces you can now transfer some of your current settings to the new workspace. Recent workspaces are now listed under the File Menu : Switch Workspace item for quick access. Te resource selection dialog has also had an overhaul which makes even more useful then before.You can find it at Navigate : Open Resource. You can now filter based on working set and it also includes support for Camel case. For example typing TIMF will bring up the resource file “ThisIsMyFile”. There is also a history feature showing recently opened files as well as multiple selection to open multiple resources at once. All plug-ins are now signed and there has been some usability improvements to the working set. To increase your available working space even more you now have the option to turn of the window tool bar via the context menu. You can later re-enable it via Window : Show Toolbar. Project Explorer can now group and filter elements by working set.

Another very nice new feature/improvement is the patch wizard. First it enables you to compare the contents of the patch against the local workspace. When applying CVS patches you can now manually apply unmatched patch segments to the local file. So, no more searching from .rej files, which is great news indeed.

Now one of the improvements I am really excited about are the improvements to the “Compare Editor”. I have had to use this often when their are conflicts with CVS updates but, I hated the inadequacy of this editor. Many improvements has been made to this editor which I list below.

  • The contents of compare editors are now kept in sync with other editors currently open on the same file.
  • A new text differencing algorithm makes comparisons that used to take a long time take only a couple of seconds.
  • Compare editors are now initialized in the background so that the UI
  • Many of your favorite editor commands are now available in compare editors, including find/replace, show whitespace characters, show line numbers, and the Show In sub-menu.
  • Compare editors now highlight individual changes within a block of changes. (Very happy about this one!)

You now also have the ability to turn on the “Outline View” for the compare editor by going to General : Compare/Patch preferences and then ´Show structure compare in Outline view when possible´. This alone is already great but, they went a step further and whn you click on a node in the “Outline View” the content pane of the compare editor will automaticall scroll to that area in the selected resource file. Now that is some really great stuff.Do you sometimes find yourself in a situation where the filename you want to use to make the name really descriptive of it´s purpose but the app just does not allow you to? Well this problem has been overcome in Europa. If you have Java 1.5 or higher then you can now create resources with paths longer than 260 characters on Windows. Want to open a file with a different editor then the default registered for the file type? No problem, right click on the file and choose, Open With : Other. A list of available applications will be shown, coose the one you want to use and you´re good to go.

Europa now has platform level proxy and SSH2 configuration available. Go to the new General : Network Connections page to configure this. The JSch SSH2 client has now been opened up to enable the usage thereof by other clients inside Eclipse. The key preferences page has also been improved to allow the following:

  • Update a selected binding immediately by modifying the Binding or When fields
  • Create a binding from a command by modifying the Binding field
  • Create a command from a binding using the Copy Command button
  • Remove all changes from the system with Restore Defaults

The editor area now allows drag and drop from for example the Windows Exlorer window and this has the same effect as othe “Open File” command. You can also drag an editor between workbench windows associated with the same workspace.Improved Mozilla plug-ins detection has been added as well as easier help navigation and search phrase highlighting. You can now caegorize your help searches, print multiple help topics at once and open cheat sheets directly from the web by specifying the URL. “Sub steps in a cheat sheet are now clearly separated using horizontal lines. Sub steps can now be previewed. The background colors in the cheat sheet view have been adjusted to make the active step stand out more.”

Spell checking is now available in all test editors and Eclipse comes standard with a British and English dictionary with the ability to add your own user defined library. You can now show and hide whitespace by enabling it via “General : Editors : Text Editors : Show whitespace characters”. You can also drag and drop text to and fron editors by enabling this option in “General : Editors : Text Editors : Enable drag and drop of text”. More team annotations are added, it can now be configured in a number of ways: you can select from three different coloring schemes and choose whether author and revision information should be displayed as text in addition to the coloring. There is a bunch of other time saving features that has been implemented so have a read through the “What´s New” section of Eclipse for more on the improvements to the text editors.

There are also numourous improvements to the team and CVS functions such as

  • Import CVS projects directly into working sets
  • Export working sets as part of team project set
  • History view search
  • History view now has view history that allows you to navigate back to previously viewed elements
  • Spell check in Commit dialog
  • Flat presentation in model-based synchronizations which is now the default for CVS

The tool we all love to hate has also received it´s share of improvements. The tool I am refering to is the debug tool of course. Launch selection vs. launch last has been added to allow you to run or debug the selected file or active editor. This is configured via the “Run/Debug : Launching” preferences page. When the selected resource is not an executable you can choose to either launch the associated project or launch the previously launched application. When clicking the Run or Debug buttons a option dialog will be launched to show the options available if there is more then one. A new “Run/Debug Settings” property page has been added. This allows you to view all current launch configurations asociated with a specific project as well as allowing you to add, delete or edit these. Toggle buttons have also been added to the console toolbar controlling when the console ahould automatically be displayed.

So as you can see, Europa definitely brings a lot of new features and enhancements to make our experience when working much more pleasurable. So should you upgrade? I belief so but, do not take my word for it, go to the Europa download site, grab a copy and see for yourself.

Untill next time, happpy coding
Schalk Neethling