July 3rd, 2006
Ten coolest Eclipse 3.2 features
Eclipse 3.2 was released Friday
along with 9 other projects that make up Callisto. A minimal configuration for Java development weighs in at around 52M. If you want source code and plug-in development, or other Callisto projects such as C/C++ Tools or Web Tools then that’s extra. But unlike previous releases, you don’t have to try to mix-and-match plug-ins of various version numbers. Everything that came out on Callisto day is synchronized to work together.
The new release of Eclipse has hundreds of new featuresEclipse 3.2 adds all this while being faster than 3.1 and taking less memory. that have been developed over the past year since 3.1 came out. I’ve written about many of the Java development features in a separate article, and eclipse.org has also published a New and Noteworthy page that goes into a lot of them. For this article I wanted to pick out 10 of my favorite features in 3.2 (not just in the JDT) to whet your appetite and give you a reason to upgrade.
1. Refactoring scripts and API-awareness
Let’s say you need to replace a method your public Java API with a new method. In Eclipse 3.2, when you rename the method you can have it automatically:
- keep the original method as a delegate to call the renamed method,
- mark the original method as deprecated, and
- export this refactorization and others in a script as part of your Jar file
When users of the Jar file import the new version, they can run your refactoring script to apply whatever changes are needed to adapt to the new version.
Ed Burnette is a professional developer and author of several articles and books about computing including Hello, Android: Introducing Google's Mobile Development Platform, 2nd Edition. For disclosure of Ed's industry affiliations, click here or to view his full profile click here.
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