The 12th official simultaneous release is here

Eclipse Oxygen is here: What’s new, canceled and renewed

June 28, 2017 JAX Editorial Team

The new season (a.k.a Eclipse Oxygen) is here! We finally know what’s new, what has been canceled and what has been renewed. As of today, the simultaneous release is available for download. Let’s have a look at the new projects, the ones that have been canceled and the changes or improvements you should look forward to.

It’s here, it’s here! This year’s Eclipse Oxygen —the end result of a process that sees the coordination of scheduling and communication across Eclipse Open Source Project teams— is the 12th official simultaneous release and includes “the hard work of 83 open source projects, comprising approximately two million net new lines of code. The output of this process is a composite repository of open source software and a new release of the Eclipse IDE. The Eclipse Oxygen release includes many improvements in functionality and performance, includes new tools for Java™ code coverage analysis, and can be extended to support Java 9 development via an early access preview,” according to the Eclipse website.

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Source: Eclipse Foundation

If you don’t like to be kept waiting, here’s a list of what’s new, canceled and renewed:

New projects:

Eclipse LSP4E/LSP4J
Eclipse EclEmma
Eclipse USS SDK
Eclipse VIATRA
Eclipse PMF

Projects that have been canceled:

Eclipse Andmore
Eclipse GMF Notation
Eclipse GMF Tooling
Eclipse Gyrex Project
Eclipse Riena
Eclipse Stardust
Eclipse Thym

Projects that have made a comeback:

Eclipse WindowBuilder

Projects that have been restructured:

Eclipse EMF Query
Eclipse EMF Transaction
Eclipse EMF Validation

Don’t panic, they’re not gone. They have simply been transformed into Eclipse EMF Services.

Java 9 support

Bad news, folks! Java 9 support has not yet landed in Eclipse’s standard download packages but you can add an early access preview to your existing Eclipse Oxygen (4.7) install.

According to Wayne Beaton, Director of Open Source Projects at Eclipse Foundation, the Eclipse Planning Council had discussed possibly moving their own release date to align with the anticipated Java 9 release date, but this was rejected. He claimed that” the biggest concern was the testing problem, but there was concern over whether or not the Java 9 team will meet their deadline.”

Unfortunately, we can’t release [Java 9 support] at the same time as Oxygen. The Java 9 specification is not released yet and it is not allowed (by license restriction) to release an implementation before the specification is final. JDT being an implementation of this specification (through its compiler Eclipse Compiler for Java – ECJ), it makes the whole thing tricky. The current discussions within the community are in favor of keeping the Oxygen release end of June and to provide an update with Java 9 support on day 1.

Mikaël Barbero, Senior Platform Developer at the Eclipse Foundation

Eclipse Oxygen Series: What’s New in the Eclipse Platform?

If you want to hear what’s new in the Eclipse Platform, head over to YouTube and have a look at the Eclipse Foundation’s channel. You won’t be sorry, we promise.

Here’s a webinar by Lakshmi P Shanmugam on the innovations on the Eclipse Platform and the Eclipse SDK.