Milestone 7 releases for Eclipse 3.7 and Eclipse 4.1

The Eclipse development team has released the seventh milestones of version 3.7 and 4.1 of its integrated development environment (IDE). The latest Eclipse 3.7 milestone, a "feature freeze" release, will form the basis of the next collective release for various Eclipse projects, code named "Indigo". While version 4.0, which was released last summer, was still regarded as an "early adopter" release, the developers say that version 4.1 is intended for a wider audience.

With Eclipse 3.7 M7 users can now import or export their software configuration and a branch column view has been added in the History view. According to the developers, creating patches via the Patch Wizard is now "safer and the risk of data loss is decreased as some major bugs have been solved". While previous versions relied on native refresh providers or a polling mechanism in order to keep the workspace in sync with the underlying file system, M7 adds a new Workspace preference (Preferences > General > Workspace) to "Refresh on access". In Eclipse 4.1, the latest milestone adds polish to the user interface, specifically the shared area (formerly known as the editor area in 3.x), and includes support for dragging a complete stack, as well as individual parts.

Eclipse 4.1 M7 brings user interface polish to the Shared Area.
Source: Eclipse.org As with all development releases, use in production environments and on mission critical systems is not advised. Users testing the release are encouraged to provide feedback and report any bugs that they find. According to the Project Plan web page, the final version of Eclipse 3.7 is expected to arrive "in late June"; the final version of Eclipse 4.1 is targetted for completion at the same time according to its Project Plan web page.

Details about the seventh milestones for Eclipse 3.7 and 4.1 can be found on the New and Noteworthy page and in the Build Notes. Eclipse 3.7 M7 and 4.1 M7 are available to download from the project's web site.

The latest stable release of Eclipse is version 3.6.2 from late February of this year. Eclipse is released under the Eclipse Foundation Software User Agreement.

See also:

• Eclipse 3.7 (Indigo) M7, available for download, an EclipseSource Blog post.
• Name sought for Eclipse Indigo's successor, a report from The H.

(crve)