Reviews : Eclipse 3.0 Milestone Build 2 :

What Was Added in M2

In addition to all of the features from M1, M2 contains a slew of new and bigger enhancements. These new features are varied, but seem to focus primarily on usability and teamwork themes. The most notable of the usability and general enhancements include:

• A new QuickDiff feature that will show changes, additions, etc. of a Java source file in comparison to another file, either remote or on disk. This will be a nice feature to monitor changes during the development process.
• An enhanced progress view allows for a more granular view of processing directives.
• A Javadoc view window to view Javadoc information on code segments.
• A declaration view that shows the Java source of a selected element.
• A new build process.
• Dynamic help documents for plug-ins should offer developer's better online help (or at least provide no excuses for plug-in developers).
• Quick fix and assist enhancements including a new "linked mode" that will aid in adding new arguments, creating new methods and offering additional suggestions. Additionally, plug-ins can now contribute to these dialogs.
• New Java code parsing will find redundant semi-colons, find and flag indirecxt accesses to static methods and find unnecessary type checks.

In addition, I found the teamwork features to be among the most useful upgrades. Two items in particular to note:

• A new synchronize view is in progress based on feedback from developers.
• A CVS integrative feature which allows developers to see CVS annotations from within Eclipse to find out who wrote a good (or not so good...) code segment.

Conclusion

Given that the imminent release of Eclipse 3.0 is still almost a year away, I think that Java developers can be assured that this new product should be worth the wait. I personally found the overall focus to these enhancements to be right on track, and it is nice to see development progressing on schedule. Over the next year, we can look for more enhancements to further secure Eclipse's position as a robust base IDE, and perhaps we will even see Eclipse emerge in other applications like network monitoring or other tools with their new rich client objective.

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