After more than one year in development, we are very happy to announce the major release of the next Scala IDE for Eclipse! This release enjoys contributions from 23 different developers, and brings an impressive number of new features and bug fixes.
This release brings Scala programming in Eclipse to a whole new level, with great improvements in the editor, a new Scala-aware debugger, more refactorings, a Scala worksheet and additional plugins like ScalaTest support. Read the full release notes on the Scala IDE blog.
Typesafe IDE
In order to make it as easy as possible to try out the new Scala IDE for Eclipse, we updated the Typesafe IDE bundles. Head over to the download page and get a pre-packaged Eclipse with the Scala tools pre-installed (2.9 or 2.10)! If you prefer to update your existing Eclipse installation, check out the IDE download page to get started, or read on to learn more about the highlights.
Editor improvements
The 3.0 release greatly improved the Scala editor: the new semantic highlighting feature makes it easy to spot deprecated methods, mutable variables and many other Scala-specific traits. Implicit applications are highlighted, and can be navigated to their definition. Moreover, we put a lot of effort in making the editor faster and more responsive, and moved all processing in the background. We believe that editing is now much faster and more pleasant than before!
Scala Debugger
Scala is an incredibly rich language, and its translation to the JVM introduces compilation artifacts that sometimes obscure the original program. The Scala debugger helps by de-mangling names, showing the logical structure of usual Scala collections, stepping over getters and setters (and a bunch of other artifacts), sane handling of for-loops and higher-order functions, etc. Compared to the last milestone, we made the debugger much faster and more robust.
New Scala IDE Plugins
In this release we bring an ecosystem of plugins, and make them available through the same update site as the Scala IDE. This makes it easy to discover useful plugins for Scala development. We are extremely happy to see it growing, and thanks to Chee Seng and Bill Venners, Scala IDE users can now install the ScalaTest plugin and run/debug and inspect scalatest fixtures right in Eclipse.
The worksheet is another Scala IDE plugin, allowing a new breed of interaction with your project and the language. A worksheet is a Scala file that is evaluated on save, and the result of each expression is shown in a column to the right of your program. Worksheets are like a REPL session on steroids, and enjoy 1st class editor support: completion, hyperlinking, interactive errors-as-you-type, auto-format, etc. Whether you want to explore a new library or just whip something up, the worksheet can make it fun. Don’t miss it!
We will continue to work with plugin developers to integrate new and interesting plugins in the ecosystem. Please check the ecosystem docs if you want to be part of it!
We’d also like to recognize the hard work of all contributors that helped shape this release. A huge thank you to all contributors and the great community around the Scala IDE for Eclipse!
By Iulian Dragos, Scala IDE Lead at Typesafe
