Ceylon IDE gets first official release

The Ceylon language project, led by Red Hat's Gavin King, has officially released an IDE for the language which is being developed as a Java virtual machine compatible alternative to Java. The IDE is delivered as an Eclipse plugin that offers syntax highlighting, run/debug, outline views, basic refactoring, quick-fixes, documentation on hover, error reporting through the Problems view, and automatic indentation which works with the recent first pre-release of the language and its tools.

These functions were available in pre-release versions and since then the developers have added a Ceylon perspective; wizards to create projects, modules, packages and units; cross-project navigation; integration with the Ceylon module architecture allowing dependencies to be resolved from external repositories; and additional or improved quick-fixes, refactorings and auto-completion.

Highlighting Ceylon syntax with the Ceylon IDE
Source: Ceylon project

The plugin was developed in less than six months, according to a blog posting by King, with two part-time developers and supported by the French software maker SERLI. The plugin IDE is compatible with the first milestone release (M1) of the Ceylon language. Ceylon's roadmap shows another four milestone release on the way to a 1.0 release of the language. Designed with large projects in mind, Ceylon's developers hope, among other things, to make a language with easier handling of tree-like structures and simpler ways to write generic reusable code.

The Ceylon IDE requires Eclipse 3.7 and instructions for installing it can be found on the Ceylon site's Learn pages. Source code for the plugin is distributed under the EPL 1.0 and is available from the project's github repository.

(djwm)