Eclipse IDE was originally created by IBM after getting inspiration from a SmallTalk-based VisualAge family of Integrated Development Environment. It was released in the year 2001 as an open source software after a consortium with a board of stewards including Borland, IBM, Merant, Red Hat, SuSe among others was formed. 2 years later, the number of stewards had increased to over 80 members and in 2004, the Eclipse Foundation which is the developing community was created.
The Eclipse foundation’s convention for naming the releases is the use of celestial bodies as confirmed by the names of releases in the past including Callisto, Europa, Ganymede, Galileo, Helios, up till Mars. However, in the last two releases, the foundation has deviated from astronomy theme towards the new theme of chemical elements. Neon was released in 2016.
Yesterday, 28th June, 2017, the foundation released Oxygen. Oxygen unlike the previous versions of Eclipse is installed and you can select your choice during installation.
There are 83 projects released for Oxygen, which include improvement to: Eclipse Business Intelligence and Reporting tools (BIRT), Eclipse C/C++ Development Tooling (CDT) which provides a fully functional C and C++ Integrated Development Environment based on the Eclipse platform, the Neon-pioneered Eclipse EGerrit: a project that provide a set of Eclipse plug-ins that provide code review capabilities in the Eclipse IDE, Eclipse Graphiti, Eclipse JWT, Eclipse tools for Cloud Foundry (CFT) which provides an extensible framework and common UI to deploy applications to different Cloud Foundry targets, and it is a framework that closely integrates with Web Tools Platform (WTP) and Eclipse, etc.
Oxygen is platform version 4.7 and has some of the following as its significant differences to the previous versions:
Default styling for the toolbar Improved
Windows Machines: The styling of the window toolbar has been improved, the toolbar color is now consistent with the color of the perspective switcher.
Linux and Mac Machines, the separator line was removed, which gives you a few more pixels on Linux and removes a yellow line on the Mac.
New default styling for form-based user interfaces
The default styling for form-based user interfaces was changed to use a flat, gray style. The popular “Clean Sheet” plug-in was the inspiration behind the change.
The screenshots above shows the MANIFEST.MF editor and the Git Staging view respectively in this new design.
Images are opened in the Eclipse IDE
Image files are now opened directly in Eclipse by default. The Internal Web Browser has been registered as default editor for files with the png, jpg, jpeg, gif, bmp, and ico extensions.
To open files in the default external program, use Open With > System Editor
Breakpoints in Overview Ruler
To configure the rendering of annotations, right-click the overview ruler and choose Preferences…. This directly opens the preference page General > Editors > Text Editors > Annotations.
Show JUnit failure trace in Console view
A new button has been added to the JUnit Failure Trace header to show the stack trace of a failed JUnit test in the Console view. The Console view makes it convenient to view a long and wide stack trace, copy parts of the stack trace and navigate to the classes on the stack trace using hyperlinks.
These and many more are what you get downloading the new Eclipse IDE Oxygen. Enjoy!