MyEclipse 2019.12.5 - Now, Just MyEclipse

Brian Fernandes
Director of Customer Engagement - Loves technology and almost everything related to computing. Wants to help you write better software. Follow at @brianfernandes.

Posted on Dec 5th 2019

This MyEclipse 2019.12.5 release takes us into the end of this year with support for new connectors, and upgrades across our integrated tooling. 2019.12.5 is built on Eclipse’s 2019-09 release, and includes a number of core fixes and enhancements – read on for the details.

No More CI or Stable

You may have noticed that this release is neither labeled CI nor Stable. For several years now, our CI releases have been put through the same QA processes that were normally reserved for our Stable stream, along with a less frequent release schedule. We realize that the “CI” nomenclature can lead to a different interpretation of the quality and stability of the release, so we’ve decided to stop using it. MyEclipse CI, is now just, MyEclipse, and you can treat it in the same way as you would any stable release of our product.

WildFly

We now support WildFly 17 & 18.

Note: If you hadn’t specified a custom JDK / JRE for a connector, with this update it will automatically switch to running with Java 13. If your server fails to start because it is incompatible with Java 13, please specify a different JRE / JDK in the server configuration page. The server UI will also warn you of known Java-version incompatibilities when you’re configuring a new connector.

WebSphere

EJB Deploy

If you’re using EJB 2.0 and the EJB Deploy capability, there were some bugs that prevented it from working unless you started MyEclipse with Java 8. This will now work out of the box with Java 13, and you no longer need to change the JVM.

WAS 9.0.5

While earlier versions of WebSphere 9 would work, WebSphere 9.0.5 could not be started from within MyEclipse due to SSL bugs. These have now been resolved and you can now use the latest version of WebSphere with this release.

Java Enhancements

There are a host of Java enhancements that we think you will benefit from in this release of MyEclipse.

Chain Completion

Our favourite feature is chain completion suggestions for content assist. Chain template support will traverse reachable fields, local variables and methods, to produce a call chain whose return type is compatible with the expected type.

Java Formatter

Getting blank lines to format just right has always been a challenge – well, the Java formatter now has a number of settings that will help you get your code formatted the way you want it. There are a number of other formatting settings that have been added since 2019.04 too.

Other Java enhancements you might find interesting – history for expressions in the variables view, synchronization between standard and error output in the console, and a new, advanced module dependencies tab for the Java Build path.

Quick Search

Search isn’t exciting, but once you see what Quick Search can do, we’re sure you’ll use it all the time. Just press Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + Alt + L to do a content search across all files in your workspace, with a preview showing matched text. You will probably want to change that binding to something less onerous though!

Miscellaneous Fixes

Matisse continues to remain popular – a bug prevented new Swing components from being properly created using the wizards, this has now been fixed.
If you tried to run MyEclipse with Java 12 or higher, you’d face issues with licensing and activation – these are now resolved.
If you used our dark themes, colors in the SQL editors (both code and visual) were hard to read – the colors in these editors are now better suited to the dark theme.
Recent versions of Windows Defender have been known to aggressively scan Eclipse-based installations, resulting in a significant delay in MyEclipse startup time. There could be further delays when MyEclipse is running as it could start scanning your workspace as well. MyEclipse will automatically suggest the exclusion of key folders from Windows Defender to avoid this problem. For more details, please see this blog post.

If you’re coming to 2019 from an earlier version of MyEclipse, you may want to check out our previous blog and the delivery log to see what else has been happening in MyEclipse land. Do let us know what you think of this release on our forums, or on Twitter.