Red Hat and Eclipse IDE, looking back at Neon and forward at Oxygen

Last June, Eclipse IDE had a great release, named Neon. It features, among many other less visible but still quite useful improvements, many new functionalities for everyone. If you did not migrate yet and are still using an older Eclipse version, just move to Neon right now, it’s worth it!

For this Neon release, Red Hat managed to increase its contributions to the Eclipse IDE. The 2 main teams doing Eclipse IDE development (to package Eclipse IDE as .rpm for Fedora Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and to develop JBoss Tools Eclipse plugins and Red Hat JBoss Developer Studio) could spend more time working upstream, directly on the Eclipse IDE and related projects.

If you follow some Eclipse mailing-lists or Bugzilla discussions, you’ll see that Red Hat developers are involved in many areas about improving the Eclipse IDE: look and feel, usability, necessary feature set, Linux, new trends… The intention of Red Hat regarding Eclipse IDE is clear and public: we all want the Eclipse IDE to remain great and even greater than it has even been and probably the greatest desktop IDE on the market - and this continuously. Together with the numerous other motivated contributors to the Eclipse community and ecosystem, we’re confident that’s something achievable.

As discussions on mailing-list and bug tracking system are not improvements per se, let’s have a quick look at the most visible pieces of code provided by Red Hat developers into Eclipse Neon IDE:

For Neon.1 - released September 28th:

  • More Docker, including support for Docker Compose.
  • Image viewer in the Eclipse IDE so you don’t get a new window popping up when looking at an image from Eclipse IDE.
  • Improve JavaScript debugger: debugger will now be able to debug Front-End JavaScript via http or file protocols

For Eclipse Oxygen, next major release to be shipped in June 2017, here are our plans:

  • A generic and extensible code editor in Eclipse Platform, to easily support new languages.
  • Integration with the language server protocol (from VS Code) to consume for free external tools that will follow this specification in Eclipse IDE - and there are already some very good ones!
  • Continuous contribution to Platform UI to unify the various navigators and editors
  • Simplify the most common tasks by improving workflows, user interface and user experience; and spreading some UX good practices everywhere in the Eclipse IDE.

Fun times ahead! And if you’re interested, you’re welcome to contribute and get involved in the Eclipse community!

 

Last updated: November 9, 2023