Thursday, June 24, 2010

Eclipse Helios - A few interesting features!

An year old wait is over. Helios is out in the wild. Today morning, I downloaded Helios. Oops, my friend of eclipse download link got stuck. I went to the download link for the common public - eclipse.org/downloads. There goes the Helios Modeling Package.



Its a little annoying to see that GMF is not included part of the default bundles of modeling package. But, there is a quick way to install GMF in no time. I just hit the 'Install Modeling Components' toolbar button.

Some of the interesting features that captured my mind are,

1. Open an eclipse file from Command line




Based on SWT and the native launcher, the Eclipse Platform now supports opening a file from the command line.  If an instance of Eclipse is already running, that instance will open the file. Otherwise, a new instance will be started. 

2. A brand new OSGi console. You can watch whats under the hood of your eclipse ide. 



To open OSGi console, go to your Console View and select 'Host OSGi Console' from the view menu.

3. Eclipse Market Place Client



Thanks to the work by TaskTop, the creators of Mylyn, you can browse through all the interesting eclipse based apps quick and fast. Go to Help > Eclipse Market Place.

4. Headless Launch Support

A new headless plug-in "org.eclipse.pde.launching" is provided to launch applications without a user interface.

Thats all for now. Let me dig deep in to the Helios framework. View the other reviews on Eclipse Helios here.

madhu