Top 10 Eclipse Indigo Features

After 12 months, 62 projects, 46, 000, 000 lines of code, over 400 committers and 1 Top 10 List: Eclipse Indigo is available on eclipse.org (Or use the new Yoxos launcher to install Eclipse from AWS CloudFront).  For the past 10 days I’ve been counting down the 10 most exciting Eclipse Indigo features according to me:

10. Maven and Eclipse 9. Equinox / p2 Improvements 8. PDE Improvements 7. JDT Improvements 6.  Gravatars (and Other Mylyn Improvements) 5. Xtend 2 4. CDT Codan 3. RAP: Bringing Eclipse APIs to Mobile Devices 2. Window Builder

There is a lot of other interesting work happening around Eclipse, such as the Jubula Automated Functional Testing tool, but unfortunately, I haven’t had a chance to work with all this great technology.  I encourage you to try out all these great tools, and if you disagree with my Top 10 List, write your own. :-)

Now, without further ado, my number 1 Eclipse Indigo feature is: EGit/JGit 1.0.

If you haven’t used a distributed version control system – take some time and learn one now.  Distributed version control systems (DVCS), like Git and Mercurial are one of the biggest game changers in software development in the past 10 years and will become the De Facto standard for revision control sometime this decade. GitHub is already dominating the forges, and if you’re a software developer, chances are you will collaborate with someone using a DVCS before the next Eclipse release (which by the way will be called Juno).

EGit is the Eclipse Git project and it’s intended to bring Git tooling to Eclipse.  EGit is built on top of JGit, an implementation of Git in Java.  There are a ton of new features like

Blame Annotations

Staging View

Powerful History View

Commit search and commit explorer (search for past commits)

And my favorite**, an Improved Synchronize View**

Many of the Eclipse projects will be switching from CVS to Git this year, including the Eclipse SDK.

If you are new to Git, there are several resources available to help you get started. I suggested looking at the book Pro Git, and checkout Alex Blewitt’s Git Tip of the Week. There is also an Eclipse EGit tutorial for beginners.

Thanks to all the EGit / JGit commiters: Chris Aniszczyk, Christian Halstrick, Gunnar Wagenknecht, Mathias Kinzler, Matthias Sohn, Robin Rosenberg, Shawn Pearce, Stefan Lay, Sasa Zivkov, Benjamin Muskalla, Dariusz Luksza, Jens Baumgart, Kevin Sawicki, Mik Kersten, Mykola Nikishov and Remy Suen.

And finally, thank-you to everyone who helped ship Eclipse Indigo on Time and On Budget.  Remember, at Eclipse, Ship Happens.