Eclipse Project 4.4 M5 - New and Noteworthy

Here are some of the more noteworthy things available in milestone build M5 (January 24, 2014) which is now available for download.
We also recommend to read the Tips and Tricks, either via Help > Tips and Tricks... or online for Platform, JDT, and PDE.

Platform
New option for minimized stacks We've extended the MinMaxAddon to have two different display modes:
  • Use Overlays: This is the current mode where showing a view in a minimized stack opens it in a 'fly out', overlaying part of the presentation.
  • Show in the Original Location: This is a new mode that will temporarily put the stack back into the perspective layout while one of its views is active. This has the advantage that the minimized view won't overlay anything in the current presentation (e.g. your editor...).

In order to access the new mode, right-click on the Restore button of a minimized stack and select the Show in the Original Location menu item (see image below). Note that this change is global, so once it's set, all minimized stacks will use the selected mode.

Here's what the current mode looks like:

Here's what the new mode looks like. Note how the editor has been pushed to the right rather than being obscured:

We're really interested in your feedback on this! The initial response has been positive enough that we're considering making the non-overlay mode the default. What do you think? (Post your comments on bug 426556).

Removed WorkspaceLock API The WorkspaceLock API allowed a special client (usually Platform UI) to hook into the locking protocols used by the workspace implementation. This hook was used to mitigate deadlocks due to interaction with synchronous SWT events, and was never intended to be used by other clients. In the 3.0 release this API was deprecated in favor of a more general API provided by the org.eclipse.core.jobs bundle. Invoking this API has had no effect since the 3.0 release. The specific API being removed includes:
  • The org.eclipse.core.resources.WorkspaceLock class.
  • The method org.eclipse.core.resources.IWorkspace#setWorkspaceLock
Clients that directly use an API listed above should remove any references to it.
Removed IncrementalProjectBuilder#getRule() API The IncrementalProjectBuilder#getRule() method returned a scheduling rule that was required for building the project by the builder. This method was intended to be used by the builder framework only. In the 3.6 release this method was deprecated in favor of a more general method IncrementalProjectBuilder#getRule(int, Map). The specific API being removed includes:
  • The method org.eclipse.core.resources.IncrementalProjectBuilder#getRule()
Clients that directly call the API listed above should remove any references to it or replace them with calls to IncrementalProjectBuilder#getRule(int, Map). Clients that implement the API listed above should implement IncrementalProjectBuilder#getRule(int, Map) instead.
SWT does not work on Linux with GTK+ 3 version > 3.8.x The Linux GTK+ 3 port of SWT is currently broken for GTK+ versions above 3.8.x. This primarily affects users running Fedora 20, Ubuntu 14.04 (Alpha builds), openSUSE 13.1 and any other Linux distributions that bundle GTK+ 3.10.x. As a workaround, users are advised to switch back to GTK+ 2 by setting the environment variable SWT_GTK3 to 0. For more details see bug 421127.
SWT Browser now supports XULRunner 24.x An SWT Browser created with style SWT.MOZILLA can now be used with the XULRunner 24.x runtime.
Added API for sleep monitoring SWT has added two new events, SWT.Sleep and SWT.Wakeup, which are sent before the Display event loop goes into sleep and after it wakes up from sleep respectively. These events can e.g. be used to monitor the duration of sleep time in SWT applications.
JDT
Enabled coloring of variables Parameter variables and local variables are now colored by default:

This can be disabled or configured with different colors and styles on the Java > Editor > Syntax Coloring preference page.

The above features are just the ones that are new since the previous milestone build. Summaries for earlier Luna milestone builds: