Equinox

The Equinox Incubator Provisioning team has released their first milestone.

• There is a little RCP Agent used to create and manage profiles. Those same capabilities are also exposed through a text console and the same perspective can be added to a standard SDK. Oh, and you can call the same operations from code via API.
• The agent allows you to manage the profile you are running as well as other profiles.
• You can create/manage multiple profiles and all installed bundles are downloaded only once and shared between the different profiles.
• The new support is a complete replacement for Update Manager. Notice that in the fully functional Admin UI application there are no Update Manager bundles.
• There are simple, lightweight APIs for manipulating and managing profiles.
• The new provisioning support includes tools to generate metadata based on existing features, plug-ins and Eclipse installations. In fact, that is how the metadata in M1 was created.

Though this support is still in incubation, you may want to take a look by checking out theEquinox Provisioning wiki page.

Platform

Windows x86_64/AMD64 has joined the lineup of supported configurations for which SWT and Eclipse are routinely built. To use it you must be running on a 64-bit edition of Windows with a 64-bit JRE. (Note that the 32-bit versions of SWT and Eclipse can still be used on these configurations with a 32-bit JRE.)

The regular expressions support in the Find/Replace dialog (Ctrl+F) has been extended.

In theFindfield, the new pattern \R matches any line delimiter (Windows \r\n, Unix \n, and Mac \r). Note that \R cannot be used in character groups ([]), since the Windows delimiter \r\n consists of two characters.

In theReplace Withfield, several new constructs have been added, for example:

• \R inserts the document line delimiter (same asEnterkey)
• \r and \n insert carriage return and newline characters, respectively. Note that mixing line delimiters inside a document is not recommended and may lead to problems with external editors. \R is usually a better choice.
• \t inserts a tab
• \xhhand \uhhhhinsert the specified characters

Content assist and Help tell all the gory details.

The file search result now shows line matches. When in the tree layout, line matches are shown below files:

Replacing text matches (Replace AllorReplace Selectedin the context menu of the text search result view) now uses the same dialog as refactorings do - including preview and undo:

TheTeam > Ignored Resourcespreference page now allows you to specify ignore path patterns as well as file name patterns.

TheTeam > Share Projectaction now supports multi-select so multiple projects can be shared in a single operation.

The comment area of the CVS Commit Wizard now presents you with suggested corrections for misspelled words. The options are available using quick assist (Ctrl+1) and are also shown in the context menu.

File changes can now be viewed in the CVS Commit Wizard. You can view the changes for a file by double-clicking on the file in the Changes pane.

As an outcome of an Eclipse bug day, a build tab is now available for configuration of building before the launch of aProgramexternal tool.

The console encoding used when running or debugging a program automatically matches the encoding of the program being run or debugged. For example, your Java program's (or Java project's) encoding will be used by the console and a corresponding VM argument (for example, "-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8") will be added to the command line. This makes it simpler to run and debug code displaying console output.

You can now drag text into the Expressions view to create expressions.

You can now reorder entries in the Expressions view with drag and drop.

JDT

Extract Classis a new refactoring that replaces a set of fields with a new container object. All references to the fields are updated to access the new container object.

Use to:

• group fields which logically belong together; e.g., Date start, Date end, String newValue, String oldValue
• reduce number of fields
• provide useful defaults in the container object
• re-use the extracted class in other classes

To execute theExtract Classrefactoring, select a type, invokeRefactor > Extract Class, select the fields that should be used in the container class, and give meaningful names.

Example: Extractx,y,zto a new classPosition

Results in the creation of a new Position class and refactoring the original to make use of it:

Unsorted views like the Java editor's Outline view and the Members view in the Java browsing perspective can now be used to rearrange members per drag and drop:

The views show exact feedback where the member will be located after the drop.

You can now control the suspend settings for newly created watchpoints. A watchpoint can suspend execution when a field is accessed, modified, or both. The new preference is available on theJava > Debugpreference page.

You can now search for all installed JREs on Mac. Pressing theSearchbutton on theJava > Installed JREspreference page will add definitions for all VMs installed in the operating system's default location (/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions).

PDE

Tables of contents allow you to organize your Eclipse product's contribution to online help documentation. PDE now provides an editor to help you easily create, modify and visualize tables of contents for your Eclipse product.

Creating a table of contents is now as easy as dragging and dropping documentation files from the Package Explorer into the editor.

The editor also comes with a rich source page that features syntax highlighting, hyperlink navigation (Ctrl+Left) and a quick outline (Ctrl+O).

You can create a table of contents viaFile > New > Other > User Assistance > Help Table of Contents.

You can now preview changes made by theOrganize Manifestsand theExternalize Stringswizards before they are applied to the plug-in manifest files.

Much like the refactoring wizards provided by JDT, the previews allow you to select only the changes you wish to apply.

Both wizards can be invoked from thePDE Toolscontext menu of plug-in projects.