There's a hot new drop of Eclipse to warm you up during the northern winter. Here
are some of the more noteworthy things available in milestone build M5 (February
8, 2008) which is now available for download.
See the build notes for details about bugs fixed
and other changes.
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| Regions on controls |
You can now set a Region into a Control, which
allows for the creation of non-rectangular controls. This example snippet
created the snapshot shown below.
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| Tristate buttons |
API was added to allow for tristate check buttons
similar to the check buttons in a table or tree. This example snippet
created the snapshot shown below.
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| Print control to GC |
API was added to allow the printing of any Control
to a GC. For more info, check out Snippet
292.
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| Browser now uses XULRunner 1.9
interfaces |
The Browser widget has been updated to work
with the upcoming XULRunner 1.9 release (which is compatible with older
XULRunner versions). This affects all Browser instances on Linux, as well
as Windows and OSX Browser instances created with style SWT.MOZILLA.
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| Drag and drop improvements on
Mac |
When inserting an item into a tree, an indicator
is now displayed to show where the item will end up.
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| SWT for Windows 64-bit Itanium
Edition |
Windows IA64 has joined the lineup of supported
configurations for which SWT is routinely built. To use it you must be
running on Windows 64-bit Itanium Edition with a 64-bit JRE. |
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| Direct interaction with text
hovers |
Are you tired of pressing F2 to see
the full contents of a hover and to scroll down? If yes, then enable the
new Allow to move into hovers preference on the Text Editors preference
page:
Once enabled, you can just move your mouse into hovers that support
this functionality and start scrolling.
The Javadoc hovers in the Java editor now support links to other elements
and have a toolbar at the bottom for navigating, moving to the Javadoc
view and opening the corresponding declaration:
 |
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| Retain case of match when replacing |
There's a new regular expression that allows
the case of each match to be retained when using Find/Replace:
For example, replacing "test" with "\CFoo" in "Test
test= TEST" results in "Foo foo= FOO". |
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| All Markers view |
The All Markers view has been added for users
who prefer to have their problems, bookmarks and tasks in the same view
(i.e., as it was back in the days before Eclipse 3.0).
It can be found by selecting Window > Show View > Other > All
Markers
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| Help feature |
The new feature, org.eclipse.help-feature, contains
all of the plug-ins required by an RCP application in order to launch the
help system. |
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| Intro customizations |
New customizations have been added to allow
a product to define the start page, home page, and standby page when using
universal intro. |
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| Infocenter as web archive |
The help infocenter can now be packaged as a
web archive (WAR file) which can be deployed on a wide variety of servers. |
JDT
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| Breadcrumb navigation in the
Java editor |
As an experimental feature, the Java Editor
now offers a breadcrumb navigation bar which can be enabled via the Toggle
Breadcrumb tool bar button or by pressing Alt+Shift+B:
These breadcrumbs show
the path to the element at the current cursor position.
Each element in the path can be selected and actions can be invoked
on the element through the context menu or keyboard short cuts:
Furthermore the breadcrumbs let you navigate to other elements via drop-downs
for sibling elements:
It's possible to navigate to another element in the editor; but it's also
possible to navigate to any other element in the workspace and open the
element in a new editor.
Note: We're still experimenting with the breadcrumb feature. Expect
substantial changes before the 3.4 release. Feedback is most welcome. |
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| Improved cursor jumping on Quick
Fix/Quick Assist |
Invoking Quick Fix on a line with problem annotations
moves the cursor to the closest problem, which isn't always quite what
you want. For example, if you want to rename the field fString in
the following scenario:
invoking Quick Fix (Ctrl+1) will move the cursor to the warning,
which is the wrong cursor position to do a rename:
You can now invoke Quick Fix again to jump back to the original position
and choose to rename:
 |
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| Annotation formatting improvements |
Starting with 3.4M5, the Java source code formatter
provides fine-grained options for line breaks after annotations. Instead
of specifying whether line breaks should be inserted after all types of
annotations, it's now possible to specify this separately for each of the
different types of annotations:
- Annotations on members:
- Annotations on parameters:
- Annotations on local variables:
The corresponding formatter settings are:
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| Improved diagnosis of unnecessary
thrown exceptions |
The 'Unnecessary declaration of thrown exception'
compiler diagnosis has been extended to optionally report warnings for
unchecked exceptions (e.g. subclasses of java.lang.RuntimeException and java.lang.Error),
if no such exception has been explicitly thrown in the code.
By default, the compiler ignores unnecessary unchecked exceptions, but
this diagnosis can be activated on the Java > Compiler >
Errors/Warnings preference page by unchecking the corresponding box:
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PDE
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| Context Help editor |
There is a new Context Help editor
available to assist clients creating context-specific help for their
applications.
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| Browse launch configuration
logs |
The Error Log view can now be used
to quickly browse launch configuration logs.
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| Flexible plug-in project conversion |
In order to encourage clients to not use
embedded JARs, it's now easier to convert an existing JAR to a plug-in
project. To do this, simply select the JAR within your
project that you want to convert and run PDE Tools
> Convert Jars to Plug-in Projects.
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| Bundle-ActivationPolicy support |
To further align with OSGi R4.1, PDE now
supports the Bundle-ActivationPolicy manifest header, the replacement
for the now-deprecated Eclipse-LazyStart header.
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The above features are just the ones that are new since the previous milestone
build. Summaries for earlier 3.4 milestone builds: