Eclipse Photon Nears Release

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Eclipse Photon, the seventeenth annual release of the Eclipse Project, will be released on June 27, 2018, but we’re keeping an eye on all the new and noteworthy features in each pre-release milestone. 

Milestone 6 (M6) offers noteworthy features to the Eclipse Platform, Java Development Tools (JDT), Plug-in Development Environment (PDE), Equinox sub-project, and for JDT and Eclipse Platform developers.

Eclipse Platform

Although the M5 pre-release milestone didn’t offer up a lot of changes to the Eclipse Platform, M6 provides several changes: 

1. The Project Properties dialog now features a page to add or remove Natures on a project.
2. The Colors and Fonts preference page now supports configuring the text editor's Range Indicator Color option. 
3. When using the Dark theme, the text editor’s Range Indicator Color option now supports styling, the Block Selection, Word Wrap, and Show Whitespace icons are more visually appealing, and all popup dialogs and the text editor are visually improved. 
4. Workspaces can now build projects in parallel via a setting on the Workspace Preferences page.
5. All files are now automatically refreshed when accessed, without manual intervention.
6. All file paths (including duplicates) are shown on the Open Resource dialog. 

Java Development Tools (JDT)

There are several changes in the M6 pre-release milestone to the JDT:

1. When using annotation-based null analysis, there are now more ways to define which unannotated locations are implicitly assumed to be annotated as @NonNull.
2. There is now support for running Java annotation processors on test sources.
3. The readability in the Dark theme has been improved by the coloring of links and inherited members.
4. All Generate dialogs now use verbs instead of OK.
5. The sort order of libraries in the Package Explorer can now be set alphabetically.
6. Javadoc tags can now be aligned by name and/or description. 
7. A new Quick Fix, which can be invoked from the editor, resolves issues that are reported due to an unresolved module.
8. When creating a Java 9 (or above) project, there is now an option to create a module-info.java file.

Plug-in Development Environment (PDE) 

There are several changes in the M6 pre-release milestone to the PDE:

1. Sources folders in plug-in projects whose project name ends with .test or.tests or contains .tests, are now marked to contain test sources. 
2. The version attributes of all units can be updated to the newest version using the Update IU Versions from Repositories command.
3. The text colors for .target file source editors have been updated to be more legible on the Dark theme.

Equinox

There are several changes in the M6 pre-release milestone to Equinox:

1. The  SHA-256 MessageDigest implementation is now used to check an artifact's data integrity.
2. Any MessageDigest implementation can be supported as an artifact's checksum algorithm.

JDT Developers

There are not a lot of changes in the M6 pre-release milestone for JDT developers. M6 introduces package binding with recovery, which allows for problem package bindings to return a null. 

Platform Developers

There are several changes in the M6 pre-release milestone for Platform developers:

1. The package org.eclipse.e4.core.di has been released as an API, which includes InjectionException, IInjector, and InjectorFactory.
2. A new FontMetrics method, getAverageCharacterWidth(), returns the average character width of the Font as a double-precision floating point value.
3. DateTime on Gtk now supports a localized date format.
4. When building independent projects in parallel, there is an option to configure throttling of how many threads/jobs will be used.

More details on Eclipse Photon can be found in the Eclipse Project Photon (4.8) M6 - New and Noteworthy notes for the M6 pre-release milestone. These features are just the ones that are new since the previous pre-release milestone builds.

Readers can also keep up-to-date with all Java-related news by visiting the InfoQ Java homepage.