Are you excited? I am. Hopefully we’re excited about the same thing.
Today, Eclipse Ganymede was released. Eclipse is a software platform that has an amazing plug-in system that allows it to disguise itself as a Java Development Environment. That’s how it sneaks in. “Don’t mind me, I’m just a Java IDE.” And then all of a sudden you’re using it for reporting.
But, I love Eclipse. Most days, I spend my entire working day staring at Eclipse. So it’s nice that it’s a pleasure to use and continues to improve.
I’ve already mentioned the bread crumbs. Honestly, I haven’t made much use of them in practice. It’s a nice feature to have, but I find it is faster just to use the Package Explorer + Outline to get where I need to be.
A feature of Ganymede that I love and use all the damn time is the enhanced search results.
This is an example search. Notice how the results list the context of where the term was found. It makes scanning a list of matches easy.
One of the features I’m excited about is the Save Actions
I haven’t really used it, since I just found out about it. But it looks to be a nice time saver. Performing a lot of clean up automatically for you.
Also kind of interesting and part of the Ganymede release is the Eclipse Communication Framework. This allows for Collaborative Editing. Collaborative Editing isn’t new, but it could be more useful now that it’s “standard” from within Eclipse. We’ll see.
The “New and Noteworthy” is a mile long. It really is amazing that the Eclipse Foundation can coordinate a release with 23 different projects.
So thanks Eclipse, for making my life easier.