JDT Improvements, Top Eclipse Indigo Feature #7

As we approach another Eclipse release – this time with over 46 million lines of code – I’m counting down the 10 Indigo features that I’m most excited about.

While I’ve been writing about OSGi, Eclipse Run-Time technologies and the power of the Eclipse technology stack, for many people Eclipse is simply a kick-ass Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Java.  In fact, according to the most recent Eclipse Community Survey, over 75% of respondents indicated that their primary programming language is Java. It’s no wonder that improvements to the Java Development Environment (JDT) made it onto my Top 10 List (yet again).

There are improvements to Java tooling such as history for breakpoint conditions.

Static analysis improvements, such as the detection of methods that ‘could’ be static

Content assist improvements, such as the ability to introduce a new local variable with cast from within a code block

Navigation improvements such as jumping to a super implementation, and jumping to the return type.

And a Test Suite wizard that now supports JUnit 4.

In addition to this, the JDT team has started to add Java 7 support to Eclipse. However, since the Java 7 specification was not finalized in time for Indigo, Java 7 support is not yet available. The JDT team will  release an update once this work is completed (In September when Indigo Service Release 1 ships). Please see the following wiki page for the status of this work.

Kudos for all this work goes out to the JDT (UI, Core and Releng) team including: Deepak Azad, Benno Baumgartner, Tom Hofmann (nee Eicher), Markus Keller, Dani Megert, Kim Moir, Raksha Vasisht, Michael Rennie, Srikanth Sankaran, Ayushman Jain, Jayaprakash Arthanareeswaran, Satyam Kandula and Stephan Herrmann and Olivier Thomann.

For more information on the what’s new in the JDT and JDT Tips and Tricks, please see Deepak’s blog.