Updated June 28, 2018

A year ago, Eclipse Oxygen had just been released and during an interview with JAXenter, Lars Vogel, founder and CEO at vogella was already talking about his anticipation for Eclipse Photon and his expectations that Eclipse Photon would be a “usability and performance” focused release.

And the time has finally arrived! Eclipse Photon is here and it with it everything we have long-awaited!

Mike Milinkovich, the Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation, has said in the Eclipse Foundation press release: “With new language adoption happening at a faster rate, LSP based plugins will take the Eclipse IDE’s proven extensibility to the next level. Congratulations to all of the committers, projects, and Foundation staff that made the Eclipse Photon simultaneous release possible.”

Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to the future of open source IDE’s!

Stand up, Clap hands!

Eclipse Photon features a long list of additions and improvements in Java development tools, PHP development tools, and platforms.
Let’ have a quick look at the most noteworthy features of the new release.

Java development tools

Java 10 Support

• Eclipse support for Java 10
• Quick Fix to change project compliance and JRE to 10

Java 9 Support

• Eclipse support for Java 9
• New --release on the Java compiler preference page
• Use --release option for Default Access rules and EE descriptor
• Paste module-info.java code in Package Explorer
• Content assist for module declaration name
• Quick Fix for unresolved module on module name in requires directive
• Quick Fix for Non-existing or empty package on ` exports directive`
• Creation of module-info.java file on creation of a new Java9 Project
• Overriding modular build path dependencies for launching

JUnit

• Eclipse support for JUnit 5.1

Java Editor

• Quick Fix to add @NonNullByDefault to packages
• Navigate to ‘switch’ statement
• Escape non-ASCII characters when pasting into a string literal
• Improved Java syntax coloring in the dark theme
• Improved coloring of links in code element information in the dark theme
• Improved coloring of inherited members in the Quick Outline in the dark theme

Java Views and Dialogs

• Test sources
• Sort library entries alphabetically in Package Explorer
• Generate dialogs use verbs instead of OK

Java Compiler

• Option for Regex in Module Declaration Search
• @NonNullByDefault per module
• @NonNullByDefault improvements
• Test sources
• New preference added “Compiler Compliance does not match used JRE”

Java Formatter

• New formatter profile page
• Formatter: align Javadoc tags in columns
• Java code formatter preferences now styled for the dark theme
• New Cleanup Action “Remove redundant modifiers”

Debug

• Launch configuration prototypes for Java Launch Configurations
• Advanced source lookup implementation
• Debugger listens to thread name changes
• Value displayed for method exit and exception breakpoints
• Display view renamed to Debug Shell

JDT Developers

• Package binding with recovery
• Support for Regex Module Declaration Search

PHP Development Tools

General

• Unused/unassigned variable validation support
• Validation for scalars in break/continue
• Static operation validation for PHP >= 7

Fixed support for ASP tags

• PHP Explorer was replaced by Project Explorer