It’s that time of the year, when the summer finally kicks in here in Switzerland, and we all calm down and look back to what we have achieved in the last 12 months. It’s that time of the year when we have our, hopefully, last release candidate built and the release of Eclipse is only a few weeks away. In short: It’s doc-work time.

We have done a lot of doc-work last week and BTW if you have not seen it yet: The JDT has a superb help! We have a tutorial for JDT beginners and tips and tricks for the more sophisticated JDT users among you, along with help for each and every action, wizard page, and preference page. To get the latest up-to-date JDT help download RC4.

The other thing we’ve done last week is to write the JDT 3.4 New and Noteworthy. You can see the latest N’n'N in RC4 under Help > Help Contents > Java Development User Guide > What’s new. The idea of the N’n'N is to give people a quick overview of everything that is new and noteworthy in the release to help them decide if it is worth upgrading (of course it is;-).

The most important new features in the JDT are:

• Rich hovers:
  • Follow links in Javadoc hover
  • Quick fix problems in problem hover
  • Inspect variable values in the debug hover
• Java Editor Breadcrumb: Know where you are while in the editor
• Various Content Assist improvements
• SWT Templates: Build your UI the fast way
• Format edited lines on save: Keep outgoing changes to a minimum
• Extract Class refactoring: Replace a set of fields by a new class
• Compiler supports multi CPU-machines: Compile your workspace faster

Of course there are much more improvements in the JDT, not to speak about the countless improvements in the platform, or in all Ganymede projects. But the most work the JDT team has done in the last 12 months was not implementing new features, we’ve fixed bugs, 1238 bugs, to be precise.

BTW, if you happen to be at Jazoon in two weeks: I’ll be there too and will give a short talk about the JDT 3.4 N’n'N.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 at 1:08 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.