Sunday, November 14, 2010

Upgrading Eclipse to Helios (3.6)

I recently upgraded my development environment for jSuneido to Helios (version 3.6) from Galileo (3.5).

Helios has been out since June but I needed to wait for the plugins I use to be updated. Actually, this was one of the things that nudged me to update since one of my plugins started giving errors on Galileo after they updated it for Helios.

It went quite smoothly. The plugins I use are:
  • Mercurial Eclipse
  • Bytecode Outline
  • EclEmma Java Code Coverage
  • FindBugs
  • Metrics (State of Flow)

A new version of Eclipse used to mean a bunch of great new stuff. But like most software products, it's matured and development has slowed down, at least in terms of major new features. In normal usage I didn't notice much difference.

One welcome addition is the Eclipse Marketplace (on the Help menu with the other update functions). EclEmma, Bytecode Outline, Mercurial Eclipse, and FindBugs can all be installed through the marketplace, which is a lot nicer since you don't have to go to their web site, find the url of the update site, copy it, and then paste it into Eclipse. The other plugins show up in the marketplace, but don't have an install button. I'm not sure why, but it's a new feature so you have to expect some hiccups.

A minor complaint is that the marketplace is implemented as a wizard, even though it isn't really a multi-step process. Wizards can be a reasonable approach, but I think they're overused sometimes.

No comments: