By Scala IDE team on Mar 20 2013

After more than one year in development, we are very happy to announce the final 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 bugfixes.

Version 3.0 highlights include:

Without further ado, head down to the download page and get it!

Editor improvements

The most visible feature in the new release is, no doubt, the new semantic highlighting: as you type, see if an identifier is a trait, a method, whether it’s a mutable variable or it’s been deprecated. While this feature has been added in milestone 1, we’ve made crucial improvements in performance. Now you can continue editing, and colors are added in the background as soon as the typing information becomes available. Many thanks to Matt Russell for the initial implementation!

We spent a lot of time improving the editor. We spend most of the time in the editor, reading and writing code, and it is essential that the editor is as smooth as possible. We polished many aspects of editing (scaladocs, matching parenthesis, quick fixes, mark occurrences) but mostly focusing on making things faster and slimmer. We believe that now editing is much faster and pleasant than ever before! Many thanks to Simon Schäfer, who helped a great deal in improving the editor!

Scala Debugger

Debugging is another fun activity for developers, and we wanted to improve on the already excellent Java debugging tools. Scala is an incredibly rich language, and its translation to the JVM introduces compilation artifacts that sometime 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.

Plugins all the way down

In milestone 2 we introduced the Scala ecosystem, and we are very happy to see how that grows. 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!

Installation

This release comes comes 4 different flavors: It supports Scala 2.9 and 2.10, and Eclipse Indigo (3.7) and Juno (4.2). Head down to the download page and pick up the right update site for you!

A bit of statistics

This is the largest release of the Scala IDE so far, so let’s have a look at some numbers:

647 closed tickets since 2.0

347 fixed tickets

median time for a fix: 18 days

ticket open for the longest time: #2572 (1063 days)

We’d also like to take a moment and 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!

Tickets fixed:

81 Iulian Dragos 66 Mirco Dotta 59 Mirko Stocker 33 Luc Bourlier 18 Simon Schäfer 5 Hubert Plociniczak 3 Anonymous 3 Eric Molitor 3 François Garillot 2 Matt Russell 2 Miles Sabin 2 odersky 1 David Bernard 1 Eugene Vigdorchik 1 mads379 1 Matthew Farwell 1 Michael Holzer 1 zsombor 41 (unassigned)

Commits:

329 Iulian Dragos 234 Mirco Dotta 136 Luc Bourlier 45 Simon Schäfer 41 Mirko Stocker 17 Hubert Plociniczak 9 Ivan Kuraj 7 Michael Holzer 5 Dan Kilman 5 Eric Molitor 5 François Garillot 4 Amir Shaikhha 4 Eugene Vigdorchik 4 Jeremy Heiner 3 Mads Hartmann Jensen 3 Richard O. Legendi 2 Matt Russell 2 Rafał Krzewski 1 David Bernard 1 James Earl Douglas 1 Marconi Lanna 1 Sandro Gržičić 1 Zsombor Gegesy