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Eclipse 3.3 (aka Eclipse Europa) was released a few days ago and I decided to give it a spin. Here are some notes in no particular order:

• The probably isn’t a new feature, but you can configure your default web browser under Window | Web Browser.
• You can now do “Sort Members” on a whole project. You can also “Organize Imports” in the same way. Between Eclipse’s code formatter, cleanups on save, the ability to export settings for these features and The Checkstyle Plug-in for Eclipse there is no reason I can think of for all the Java code in your project not to look exactly the same.
• Libraries references by a Java project are all grouped together under a “Referenced Libraries” item in the tree view. Now you don’t have to fiddle with the filters so often.
• I gave the Dynamic Languages Toolkit a quick spin. I was able to get up and running with JRuby in seconds.
• The Help system uses Jetty now. Nice. But for some reason it wants to listen on all my interfaces, causing Windows to pop up a Firewall allow/block dialog the first time you launch the Help system. What’s up with that?
• The Java compiler’s warnings with regards to generics have been improved. Way back in the 3.3Mx days I found that it rejected some invalid generics code that would compile with 3.2, so it looks like there’s been some improvements.
• The new Run/Debug launching is weird. The default is now to have Eclipse launch what it thinks you want to launch, instead of launching the last thing you launched. You can turn off this behavior under Window | Preferences | Run/Debug | Launching by selecting “Always launch the previously launched application”.
• The new interface for the Rename refactoring is annoying. Previously I could Alt+Shift+R and a dialog would pop up with the previous name selected, so that if I typed something, it would overwrite the old name. Now I get an editing thing that takes my cursor position in the name I’m trying to refactor into account, with no obvious way of completely nuking the old name so that I can just type the new one quickly.
• The existing FindBugs plugin still works. Nice. Still need to install a Subversion plugin. Maybe it’s time to switch to Subversive?
• The Remote System Explorer is very useful.

Now for my only major gripe so far: the platform proxy settings. Bug 154100 - Platform level proxy settings has the details. These proxy settings were clearly not designed by someone who actually uses a proxy on a daily basis, especially with a laptop. Here are some hints:

• As I move around with my laptop between networks, my proxy settings usually need to change. The proxy settings need some kind of “profile” feature. I guess I could switch workspaces, but that’s just annoying.
• As far as I can tell, I can’t exclude ranges of IPs or hostnames with wildcards (e.g., *.foo.com or 192.168.0.0/255.255.0.0 or 192.168.0.0/16). I guess I could type in the host name or IP address of every machine on my network, but that’s going to take a while.

And if you’re going to fix this second issue, don’t be stupid like Firefox. If I add 192.168.0.0/255.255.0.0 to the list of IPs to exclude, I actually also mean any host name that resolves to an IP in that range.

Update: Tried Subversive. No, thank you. I’ll stick with Subclipse for the moment.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 1st, 2007 at 4:09 pm and is filed under Java. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.