Right for EclipseConNA 2016 next week we released e(fx)clipse 2.3.0. This release mainly provides features in the runtime layer.

Where to get it from

If you are interested in the Tooling you can:

• Install it into a 4.5.2 install using the http://download.eclipse.org/efxclipse/updates-released/2.3.0/site
• Or download a prebuilt package from http://efxclipse.bestsolution.at/install.html

If you want to develop e4 application who use JavaFX instead of SWT you need to point your target-platform and built towards http://download.eclipse.org/efxclipse/runtime-released/2.3.0/site.

Let’s take a look of the most interesting new features and changes.

Source editing

A lot of work has gone into the StyledTextArea where we rewrote the internals and implemented our own virtual-flow element instead of reusing the ListView provided by the JavaFX library.

We also did this to provide many new features:

• Keyboard navigation like in the Eclipse IDE
• Support for Error-Markers in the text area (see screenshot below)
• Support to display white space characters (see video below)
• Pluggable Rulers for the left Editor side

The following screen shot demonstrates the error markers inside the text:

The following video provides you an overview what features the code editor widget provides with the 2.3.0 release.

Object Serialization / Deserialization

We enhanced the ObjectSerializer-API allowing adding support for collections with none basic types (eg. a Set/List of Enums).

@Inject
ObjectSerializer serializer;

enum States {
  STATE_1,
  STATE_2,
  STATE_3
}

public void serializeData() {
   String data = serializer
     .serializeCollection( Arrays.asList( STATE_1, STATE_2 ), States.class );
}

and as the @Preference-System of e(fx)clipse is delegating to the obserializer you can use it there too.

@Inject
@Preference(key="state")
Property<List<State>> stateList;

public void rememberState(List<State> state) {
  stateList.set( state );
}

Accessibility Improvements

We worked a bit on improvements of the accessibility support eg making use of the accessibilityPhrase defined in your E4-Application model, makeing FontIconView mouse transparent, … .

Preparing for JDK9

To implement certain features we need to none public JavaFX APIs, we got rid of most of them but there’s most likely still work do be done.