June 30, 2005
Eclipse 3.1 highlights
There are a lot of goodies in the brand new Eclipse 3.1, even for those of us who have been using milestone builds. The new features I find the most interesting are:
- Restricting access to packages or classes. Using regular
expressions, you can ask Eclipse to flag any import of classes that belong
to private or proprietary packages. For example,
TestNG exports its
public API in org.testng and the implementations are in org.testng.private.
Marking this latter package as restricted guarantees that you will never
import it accidentally. Similar use cases would be: not relying
on internal API's (com.sun.*) or avoiding J2ME proprietary API's (com.nokia.*).
- Visual overrides. You can now highlight methods that override
methods from superclasses. Very convenient.
- Externalized strings preview. Hover on a getString() parameter and
Eclipse will look up the corresponding string in the resource bundle.
- Single-stroke refactoring undo. Being able to undo a refactoring was already handy, but it now takes a single Ctrl-Z to undo even a complex refactoring.
The entire list of the new features can be found here.
Posted by cedric at June 30, 2005 10:37 AMWasnt Eclipse able to mark overriden methods before? Or is it just a different way to mark them in latest version? If its the latter, than its just eye candy, if its the first, then eclipse wasnt an IDE before.. :-)
Posted by: Marc Logemann at June 30, 2005 11:03 AMMark, I gues what Cedric is referring to is that you can actuall highlight thich method came from the particular superclass or belog to selected interface as you can see on the screenshot.
Posted by: eu at June 30, 2005 12:51 PMAbout "Visual Overrides", as shown in the screenshot, how useful can it be if there are several methods declared by the interface and each takes one screen, for example? (I don't like code folding...)
Posted by: Lucian Pintilie at July 1, 2005 04:01 AM