We are very pleased to announce the release of e(fx)clipse 0.9.0. This is the first release under the Eclipse.org umbrella and although it took us much longer than estimated we are now in good shape to explore future endenvours.

Anyways what’s in the release!

Download & Update sites

Update site

You can install e(fx)clipse 0.9.0 into any kepler release from our update site which is at http://download.eclipse.org/efxclipse/updates-released/0.9.0/site. As a prerequisit you’d have to have Xtext & Xtend 2.5.0 so you need to add their update site as well http://download.eclipse.org/modeling/tmf/xtext/updates/composite/releases/

All-In-One Downloads

As always to free you from assembling your own SDK we provide you with prepackaged SDKs at http://efxclipse.bestsolution.at/install.html. You’ll notice that we are not supporting 3.8.x any more officiallys so the download has been removed. We’ll update to 4.3.2 once it is released.

New Features

Mobile Support

We started to add initial support to develop mobile JavaFX applications. This support is very preliminary but we’ll build on it in the next releases so that developing and deploying mobile JavaFX applications using e(fx)clipse.

FXML to Java compiler

Also experimental new feature is our FXML to Java compiler which is an important asset when developing for constrainted devices like mobile and embedded ones.

JavaFX8 support

We’ve improved our JavaFX8 support including appropriate detection of the javafx-src.zip in your JDK install so that you can now directly navigate and step through JavaFX code with the Eclipse Java Debugger.

Runtime improvements

We’ve improved our runtime libraries and added new features like @ContextValue (see https://tomsondev.bestsolution.at/2013/11/21/writing-ieclipsecontext-less-code/) and adapter framework. We started collecting recipes how ti use the features at https://wiki.eclipse.org/Efxclipse/Runtime/Recipes

e4 integration

Our renderers have been improved and gaps to e4 on SWT have been closed. One of the major new features is a generic lifecyle system for your model elements allowing you to e.g veto the closing of a perspective, window, part. We also added the possibility for you to decide which panel type is injected to your MPart and MToolControl contribution.

Future

0.9.0 will be the last release in the 0.9.x stream. We’ll release 1.0.0 together (but not part) with Luna. Most of the runtime will switch to Java8 as the required platform while the tooling will still provide support for Java7 although Java8 is the main target platform.

We expect most people writing JavaFX application to use JavaFX8 because it is much more mature than JavaFX2.2 so we believe it makes sense to not spend time on Java7 compat things.

Runtime

The main target is to catch up on Eclipse 4 Luna features and close the last few gaps like Min/Max and DnD support. We’ll also integrate our SWT on JavaFX implementation providing developers a smooth migration path for the existing SWT-RCP applications.

Tooling

Nothing has been decided yet but on potential new feature is the direct integration of SceneBuilder into the Eclipse IDE so that you get a WYSIWYG tool inside Eclipse instead of running a 2nd application next to it. We’d really like to see this integration happening but first have to evaluate how much work it is and if it is too much we won’t be able to do it without getting funded.