Resource Improvements, Top Eclipse Helios Feature #10

Pop quiz: Can you name any ‘high quality’ software that has been consistently delivered on-time, for 8 years in a row?

Yes folks it’s that time of year again! It’s time for the Eclipse Release Train to start revving up its engine for another high quality release. Unlike other software – which gets delayed, bumped or put-on-the-back-burner – Eclipse just simply, delivers.

The official Eclipse release – named Helios – is not arriving until June 23rd, but in keeping with tradition, I thought I would help count down the next 10 business days with the Top 10 Helios features I’m most excited about.

As many of you know, Eclipse is no longer Just a Java IDE. Eclipse is a tooling platform, Eclipse is runtime stack, Eclipse is set of world class IDEs, Eclipse is an eco-system, Eclipse is like family. Before I start to count down my favourite features, I should state that I only use a small subset of Eclipse. There are some really exciting things happening in the C/C++ development tools. The SWT team has added some fantastic new MacOS and Windows Vista support.

The Birt and Web tools team continually pump out great code. While all these projects are doing cool things, sadly, I don’t get to use them on a day-to-day basis.  Because of this I can’t talk about them here. As I’ve said in the past, this really is My Top 10 List. So please – if you disagree with me – write your own Helios Review (you might even win a prize).

Number 10 on my list is Resource Improvements. This includes everything from virtual folders to the file permission management.

As well, a number of enhancements have been added to the Open Resource dialog.

Thanks goes out to the Resource Team, and in particular Serge Beauchamp, for this.

In addition to the improvements to resources, one of the oldest feature requests related to files has finally been fixed: Bug 4922 (yes, a 4 digit bug number). Eclipse now has the ability to open a file from the command line (and have it open in an existing running instance of Eclipse). While this may seem like a trivial enhancement request that all IDEs should support, the API behind this feature is what makes it so interesting. As RCP developers, you can make use of this API to load data files into other running processes. As Eclipse programmers you can double click Java files and have them open in Eclipse.  And like everything in Eclipse, this works across platforms.  If you’re interested in the technical details, checkout Andrew’s Blog. Huge kudos go out to Andrew Niefer, Kevin Barnes, and Oleg Besedin.