RCP Improvements, Top Eclipse Luna Feature #10

Seven years ago Eclipse Europa was released. PDE ‘Brought Sexy Back’, CTRL+Awesome shipped and EMF pushed ahead with the brave new world of Java 5. Seven years ago I also wrote my first Eclipse Top 10 List. While a lot has changed in seven years, Justin Timberlake is still on top of the pop world and Eclipse is still shipping quality software, on-time and on-budget.

This year also marks the 10th anniversary of Eclipse 3.0 – the year Eclipse switched to the annual release format. In fact, Eclipse Luna will ship 10 years to the day that the first Eclipse annual release was delivered (June 25th 2004).

To help celebrate the Eclipse Luna release, I’m counting down the Top 10 Eclipse Luna features I’m most excited about.

It’s fitting that number 10 on my list is related to Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP), a feature that first became available 10 years ago with Eclipse 3.0. Eclipse RCP meant that the Eclipse platform and programming model could be used for more than just developing IDEs. In fact, Eclipse was branded as a platform for everything and nothing in particular. Over the years, tool support for Eclipse RCP was enhanced, better build technologies (such as Tycho) were developed, books were written (and written again), and RCP applications were literally ‘out of this world’.

Eclipse RCP continues to improve; and this year, assembling RCP applications just got a lot easier. The Eclipse product editor now supports platform specific launching arguments and config.ini properties. You can now set program arguments and VM settings on a per-platform basis.

Also, configuring bundle start-levels is easier with a tool to help set default start levels for common bundles.

Finally, software update sites can be specified directly from the Product editor. No more hacking on p2.inf files just to list your software sites.

Only 10 more days until Eclipse Luna ships. What are you most excited about?

For more Eclipse Tips & Tricks, follow me on Twitter.