Eclipse 3.0 is out

It’s done, it’s finished. The last production release of the Eclipse IDE,
2.1, dated March 28, 2003, is history, friends! After a journey of nearly a year and a half, paved with several
milestone releases, Eclipse has reached the final 3.0 release.

Version 3.0 is a milestone in another sense. Eclipse added the last features
its competitors offered and came close to perfecting
features it already had.

Just look at the list of improvements in the official summary,
Eclipse 3.0 — New and Noteworthy.
Work went into nearly every major part
of the IDE, from the user interface to
the debug perspective.

Version 3.0 is a big step up from 2.1, as I could already see in the milestone releases
I tested. I strongly recommend that 2.1 users move to 3.0. I’d
even say they’ll have little trouble getting used to the new features. There may be a few problems
with older plug-ins that don’t quite work under 3.0.

Eclipse has been growing steadily in popularity as the main development environment for Java,
and we can expect 3.0 to help it along. There’s no doubt the competition is in
check. The only thing keeping it from checkmate is some genuinely specialized functionality that plug-in developers haven’t
been able to deliver at the level required.

Let a new era begin, an era of solar eclipses…

Related articles

• (May 26, 2004, Jirka Hradil’s blog) Eclipse Project 3.0 milestone build M9
• (Dagblog, April 7, 2004) Eclipse Discussion Forum
• (April 1, 2004, jAbloK) Lucie Rút Bittnerová — Eclipse 3.0M8
• (Dagblog, March 30, 2004) Eclipse 3.0 M8 — Another Step Toward Perfection
• (March 27, 2004, TheServerSide) Eclipse M8 with new UI is released
• (Daglbog, March 17, 2004) Eclipse in Book Form
• (Dagblog, March 8, 2004) Back to the Future — Code Editors or IDEs
• (Dagblog, February 11, 2004) EclipseCon 2004
• (Dagblog, January 6, 2004) Plans for the Eclipse 3.0 Milestone