Eclipse Galileo

For those Java developers who think that Eclipse is best Java community could ever get out of Open Source other than Java itself, here is the latest release code-named Galileo. Galileo is this year’s release from Eclipse with 33 projects. Last year’s release Ganymede contained 23 projects in comparison.

 

galileo

 

Of course this release is not only meant for JEE developers but for lot many others developers in different domains. Galileo has come in different packages like its predecessors. Different packages have different capabilities and are targeted for specific developer communities. The summary can be found in following table available over Eclipse website

 

Eclipse Packages

 

Being much into Java, JEE, Modeling and PHP development and little lesser into Plugin Development, Reports, Mobile or C/C++ on different OSs, following are my review comments on latest Eclipse release.

Highlighted functionalities added in Eclipse platform are –

  • Brand new update manager and plugin-installation UI referred to as p2

update manager

  • CDT package has got new and improved debugger for managing parallel programming.
  • Shortcut keys for going between different opened editors and multiple tabs in same editor simplified – along-with Ctrl+F6/Ctrl+Shift+F6, Ctrl+PgDn/Ctrl+PgUp for previous or next editor and Alt+PgDn/Alt+PgUp for previous or next tab.
  • Rectangular selection can be done in editor. Use default shortcut key Alt+Shift+A and you can select any text in rectangular pattern –

rectangular selection

  • In XMLs, fully qualified class-names are hyperlinked.
  • Hyperlinked method calls inside code provide option to go to declaration or implementation

hover 3.5

  • Auto-completion for constructors is included-

constructor auto-completion

  • Hyperlinks in JavaDoc headers (Java / JEE)
  • inheritDoc tag support is included for JavaDoc.
  • The Validation model works quite well as compared to its annoying behavior at some times in Ganymede
  • Compare view is updated and now it includes many new features like hyperlinks, hover displays JavaDoc and outlining etc.

compare view

  • Word document comparison includes Word compare support for showing changes as per revisions
  • New toString() generator has been included

toString

  • Breadcrumb in Debug mode has been enhanced and now it shows active debug context
  • Modeling is one thing which I liked a lot in this release (EMP) showing the emergence of Modeling in pragmatic approach.
  • Now PDT provides internal support for PHP 5.3. PDT has been one of the ambitious projects from Eclipse Development team for quite long time and it has nurtured very well since its first release. Have been using it now and then and realize its power for development of full-fledged PHP web projects.

 

I was little disappointed on finding some of my favorite plugins not working in Galileo – Eclipse team should get serious about downward compatibility of plugins. Also you can face problems while doing development  in emf where you might get errors referring to line numbers while there are no line numbers in source code and there will be errors which appear in dialog boxes than in panes.

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