The Eclipse Foundation yesterday released the latest version of the Eclipse IDE, named Ganymede (press release). This is the first attempt at synchronising the release of a new version of the IDE with new versions of plug-ins and 23 of the ~90 registered plug-ins have managed to come up with new releases alongside the main IDE.

I use Eclipse for a few different things, including writing in Java, HTML, JavaScript, PHP and LaTeX. I downloaded and installed the JEE version of Eclipse, which obviously supports Java straight out of the box, along with HTML and Javascript (which you can now format automatically). However, in the Europa release of Eclipse I use the PDT project plug-in to support coding with PHP. The PDT set of tools isn’t included by default with Ganymede. Unfortunately, the current release doesn’t work on Ganymede, and there are no plans to release a new version until 15 September 2008. That means I’m going to have to stick with Europa for PHP until then, and I’m inclined to just use it for everything, rather than have two versions of Eclipse going on my machine. EDIT: Sasha has posted a comment linking to this page on the PDT Wiki, which details how you can get Ganymede playing nicely with the current version of PDT.

I haven’t even tried to installed TeXlipse yet! EDIT: v1.2.0 of Texlipse installed OK, and will highlight syntax and show document outlines correctly. However, I’ve not been able to make it compile anything. A colleague at work had the same problem with Texlipse and Europa, while I never did, so this might be machine-specific.

First impressions of Ganymede are pretty good anyway, with the main exciting feature being built-in SVN support through the bundled Subversive plug-in. Well, to a degree at least. Before I could connect to our repository here at work, I had to install an SVN Connector from the following update URL in Eclipse:

http://www.polarion.org/projects/subversive/download/eclipse/2.0/update-site/

I initially tried the JavaHL connector, but then actually read the documentation on this page, which states that JavaHL is “win32 only”. So, I subsequently installed the SVNKit 1.4.something release (1.5.0 is available, but is an RC not a full version) and everything worked fine.

First impressions of Subversive are good, with the software automatically knowing which folders are trunks, branches, tags, etc., and setting icons accordingly. I’ve not yet done any merging, but there seem to be big GUI improvements there over the previous SVN plug-in I was using (Subclipse). Subversive seems to be playing fine with our SVN server in general.

There’s a good summary of the changes in Java on the Eclipse help site. For example, “Code clean up on save” lets you perform certain actions each time a file is saved, such as formatting the code, and removing trailing whitespace. There have been loads of improvements to Content Assist (the bit that tries to auto-complete code for you), which I won’t detail here, but they’re worth looking at. There’s now a “Template for adding JUnit 4 test methods”, although I’ve not tried it yet. In fact, there’s so many improvements I’m going to just give you that same link again, and urge you to check it out.

So overall, Ganymede seems pretty good, and there are definitely some features in there which I think will prove useful. Roll on September and the availability of PHP in there, and I’ll be a very happy bunny.