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.

If you are a user of our latest milestone build 3.4 M6a (you should!) you might have noticed that some of our hovers have changed their behavior: It is now possible to make them sticky by moving the mouse into the hover. This is much more than just a small enhancement: For us this is important new infrastructure and for you it will not less than change the way you will interact with the Java editor in many areas.
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In M5 the good old Java editor will have something new in it: The Breadcrumb.

Breadcrumbs show the path to the element at the current cursor position:

You can read all the details about this feature (and of course others) in the 3.4 M5 New and Noteworthy. In this blog I want to talk about the motivation behind this feature and where we are heading with this.

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We have several new features on our plans for M5.

Some of the more exciting features are:

• Rich hovers (bug 200838): Rich hovers will provide ways to make a hover in the text editor sticky without the necessity to take your hand off the mouse. Rich hovers will also allow to contain links and/or buttons. A first cut of this feature is already available in integration builds >= I20080115-0800. Give it a try and provide feedback. You need to go to the ‘Text Editors’ preference page to enable and configure it:

  

• Breadcrumb (bug 210830): The breadcrumb in the Java editor shows the element at the cursor position and all its parent elements. The user can invoke actions on any such element. Here is a screen shot of how this may look:

  

• Templates View (bug 69581): A view showing all text templates. The user can drag and drop from the view to the editor to apply a template and from the editor to the view to create a new template. This is a contribution from Dakshinamurthy Karra.
• Hyperlinking improvement (bug 215473): Allow to present more than one hyperlink target for a given text range. We probably going to show a pop up which shows all possible targets when you CTRL-move over a link position in the editor. This will allow to integrate features like ‘Go to Implementation’ nicely.
• Quick Fix improvement (bug 201878): At the moment if CTRL + 1 finds warnings or errors on the same line, it jumps to the closest problem and offers proposals for that problem. This is sometimes not what you want, e.g. if you want to rename the element at the cursor position. I think a solution is to allow to press CTRL-1 again to jump back to the original cursor position.

As you see there is a lot on the plan. I hope we can provide all these exiting new features for M5. Some of these features are hard to implement. For example the rich hover due to event handling, which differs from platform to platform. Or the breadcrumb due to action enablement when the focus is transfered into the breadcrumb.

In the previous blog post, I have shown how to use and add templates through the UI. In this post, I’m going to show how to contribute templates and template variables through an extension point.

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One of our 3.4 plan items is improve template mechanism and offer a set of SWT templates. We’ve added this in 3.4 M2.
In this blog post I’ll describe how to use these new SWT templates and how to add your own templates, because templates can save you from typing the same chunk of code over and over again.

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In this blog we discuss new features and APIs from the JDT/UI, JDT/Text and Platform/Text projects.

This is my first blog, so please bear with me. Although this is a team blog, it is planed, that I will write the blog entries, but I hope, that other team members, or even community members, will write blog posts as well from time to time. I plan to have a blog post every two weeks.

If you are interested in a specific topic then leave a comment here please.