e(fx)clipse 1.1.0 released

I’m happy to announce the general availability of e(fx)clipse 1.1.0!

The release

I’ve blogged in the last few days up the new features you’ll get with 1.1

But beside these highlights we’ve resolved a total of 47 tickets (28 runtime, 19 tooling)

The urls to fetch the latest bits are:

Runtime-Repo is at http://download.eclipse.org/efxclipse/runtime-released/1.1.0/site (zip)
Tooling-Repo is at http://download.eclipse.org/efxclipse/updates-released/1.1.0/site (zip)
FXML-Compiler is at http://download.eclipse.org/efxclipse/compiler-released/1.1.0/org.eclipse.fx.fxml.compiler_1.1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar

Naturally we have also updated the prebuilt distro so that you don’t need to find out the pre-requisits yourself and start developing javafx applications immediately! Distros for all 3 major platforms (Windows, Linux and OS-X) are available from http://efxclipse.bestsolution.at/install.html

The community

I’m amazed about the developer community we managed to shape around e(fx)clipse which already starts to contribute patches and ideas for improvement. We try to follow the example of the EMF people and leave no question unanswered on our forum or leave gerrit-patches unmerged or uncommented with in 1-2 work days.

What I’m not so amazed about is the support with get from people who are using our components in their application. We totally understand and are committed to the ideas of OpenSource software but without starting to generate revenue the first class support we provide through our forum and other services we provide for free at the moment (e.g. prepackaged distros) will be reduced.

If you are using e(fx)clipse in a commercial application it should be in your own interest to keep us working full force on bugfixes and features you require in your applications.

We are not asking for charity donation but e.g. about hireing our experts to setup and structure your e4+JavaFX application, implement special features, make use of all features e4+JavaFX provide (I guarantee – you don’t know all features e4 and e4+JavaFX provide) and apply them in creative ways to solve your problems in a much more elegant fashion.

In any case – if you have an application who makes use of e(fx)clipse tooling and/or runtime components we’d be interested to learn about and add you to our reference page.

What’s up for the future

We have not yet made the plan on what we’ll put the focus on for the 1.2 release.

The runtime platform is stable and provides more features than the one you are used to from e4 + SWT (I’d argue that it does things in the more correct and better way than its “older” brother). I know it misses the minimize/maximize feature of e4+SWT but I’ve never seen the real need for this in RCP-Applications. So to me not providing this feature is of no big deal, in case it is for you contribute the implementation or think about sponsored development.

The tooling needs some polishing and we want to improve the CSS-Editor even more.

SWTonJavaFX is onhold until someone steps up and makes the investment to improve it – for our applications it is good enough.

An area you’ll most likely see progress is in our research projects

to implement a CodeEditor-Framework on top of JavaFX/e4/JDT/Nashorn & Flux which helps us to find missing features
to implement jface-viewer 2.0
to develop an SWT-Extension-API which allows RWT and SWTonJavaFX to break out of the trap and use advanced features like animations, ARGB-Colors, Async-APIs, …

but they are research projects – their code is in the repo but they are not part of any release.

Enjoy e(fx)clipse 1.1.0 and help us improve the tooling and runtime platform