Saturday, June 27, 2009

Eclipse Galileo - The first impression

During the last 5 years it became sort of tradition: I'm waiting till the end of June to download the latest release of Eclipse. The cynics usually say: "Wait for the first SP, the release is always full of bugs!" But I'm never patient enough to wait.

Usually I'm downloading the JEE bundle (the one that previously was called "wtp-all-in-one") and this is exactly what I did this time. The budnle's size for Galileo became larger: 189MB.
The Europa was 126MB and Ganymede was 163MB. Actually wtp-all-in-one 2.0.1 was 259MB, so 189MB is not that large.

Before launching Eclipse, I always take a look to eclipse.ini.
The good news: It now contains predefined memory settings, so it doesn't use the JVM defaults. And you don't need to remember how to set -Xms and -Xmx ("after -vmargs that must be the last arguments in the command line..." and so on).
Somehow it contains the double definition of launcher.XXMaxPermSize (a bug?)
In addition, I prefer setting also PermSize to 256MB and setting both -Xms and -Xmx to the same size: 512MB.
For the first run I decided to leave these settings as is.

So let's see it running... Wow, it started quite fast. If Eclipse became faster, it's really the good news. It always was somewhat slow.

The "Welcome" page. Also different. OK, links to JEE sub-projects... Here it is, the "What's New" section. Click. Click. Click. Hey! What's going on? Nothing happens! Samples? Tutorials? Workbench? Oh, finally it worked. Here comes the Workbench. And where is "What's New"?
Listen, folks, it's very disappointing that you put broken links on the "Welcome" page.

Anyway I think I can find "What's New" section myself: Help -> Help Contents. Wow! This was quick! Workbench User Guide -> What's New in 3.5. Great!

Don't be frightened. I'm not going copy here the whole "What's New" section. I'll only mention the bullets I have really liked:
1. Switching between open editors and multiple editor pages has been streamlined. Ctrl+PageDown and Ctrl+PageUp now always activate the next or previous editor tab, even in multi-page editors. To switch between pages of a multi-page editor, use Alt+PageDown and Alt+PageUp. - Cool! I really hated the previous situation, when multi-page editor makes you stuck, when you're using Ctrl+PageUp to switch between the open editors.
2. The whole "Install New Software" section has been completely changed again. I say "again", since it was completely changed just one year ago. From the first look, it's better now. I've installed CollabNet Desctop pretty smoothly.
3. Textual editors now support block (aka column or rectangular) selection mode. Quite a cool feature.
4. An Open Implementation hyperlink has been added for overridable methods, which directly opens the implementation in case there's only one, or shows all the concrete implementations for that method in the hierarchy of its declaring type, using the quick type hierarchy. By default, the hyperlink appears when you hold down the Ctrl key while hovering over an overridable method.
5. And here comes the coolest feature till now: The new toString() generator allows you to quickly generate a toString() method for your class. I was really missing this feature!
6. As usual there are compiler enhancements with new warnings. Nothing really special, but it's nice to have them. I'm still waiting for the warning about calling non-private methods from the constructors.
7. And the last enhancement, I would like to mention, is using Plug-in Spy in menus. Previously, it was possible to open a Plug-in Spy from Views and Editors only. Now its abilities were extended to menus: click Alt+Shift+f2 and select the menu.

So these were my favorite features from the "What's New" sections. In addition, I paid attention to some unmentioned (but still cool) content assist features. For example, when creating an anonymous class from the interface, the methods are generated automatically.
I believe there are many more features I didn't pay attention yet.

Let's sum up: The first impression from the Eclipse Galileo is very positive. The bugs I paid attention till now are minor and there are a lot of cool features.
In addition, I have a feeling that Eclipse Galileo is faster then the previous release. I hope it isn't just a feeling and that it IS faster.
I'll continue using Galileo and promise to report anything that is worthy mentioning in this blog. So follow up :)

1 comment:

Alexander Lipatov said...

Да, действительно неплохо, но могли бы сделать больше и лучше.. я не особо впечатлен))