Tag Archive for 'galileo'

This post is probably a little bit late since since Galileo has been released for almost 4 weeks now. Nevertheless, I’d like to give my own opinion about the release and point some interesting stuffs that may be also useful.

Galileo is the fourth simultaneous release from Eclipse. The other three are named Callisto, Europa, and Ganymede. In term of the size of the release, Galileo is the biggest release ever with about 30 projects take part in the release. The list of the contributing projects can be seen here.

The biggest improvements Eclipse made in this release in my opinion are the support for native Cocoa 32bit/64bit and the new update manager (code p2) which hopefully will make update job easier than ever.

Aside from those biggest improvements, many small changes are also introduced. My most interesting changes are following:

1. Column editor. Sometimes, I need to adjust several lines in a source code. For example, I want to move them all one tab to the right or one tab to the left. This column editor is very handy for such case. Note that thanks to auto format, this is not a common problem, but still if I work with for example CSS file (for which Eclipse doesn’t have auto format capability), this is a nice enhancement.
2. Open implementation link. When you use a method, you probably want to know how the method is actually implemented. If the method is defined in an interface, this mean that you’ll need to go to the interface and from there search for the implementation of the method. Galileo streamlines the workflow and now you don’t need to go to the interface.
3. Links in Javadoc. When the javadoc popup comes, you can click the method name or class name to get the documentation.
4. equals, hashcode, and toString generator. While I’m a fan of user-customised equals, hashcode, and toString generator, an auto generator will not hurt and it gives proper base for further implementation.
5. Some warning improvements. When you override equals, you should override hashcode. If you override synchronized methods, you should make it also synchronized. Seems natural, isn’t it? But suprisingly, no warning is given in the previous version of Eclipse. You get it now in Galileo.
6. More improvement to XSD and XML editor. It seems now faster and lighter and… more robust both in graphical view or in text view. One feature that seems to be missing is I can’t add ‘anyType’ in XSD graphical editor.
7. Seems that the Visual Editor Project is coming back from the hibernation. While I got problem to install it correctly (has to do some hacks to make it works, which unfortunately breaks the XML/XSD editor), this is a good news. I’m a fans of VEP and not really into Netbeans Matisse (I must note that VEP is not part of Galileo).