the corner office

Friday was like, waaay auspicious because Eclipse 3.3, aka Europa, was released. I've installed it, but I haven't used it enough to see what's really cool and what's not. I didn't immediately register that it's been a year since I upgraded to Callisto. It's been a year dammit, it's July already, and we're more than halfway through 2007. Sheesh.

Upgrades aren't a biggie for normal Java development, but it's less clean if you're doing Eclipse RCP work, because many of the underlying Eclipse APIs change. The docs say everything's meant to be backwards compatible, and after checking out my icky fledgeling 3.2 RCP projects into a 3.3 workspace, that seems to be the case. Some things have changed or been deprecated though, and I was faced with a raft of compiler warnings, all of which I feel compelled to deal with and fix, because that's just what I'm like. No point in hanging around with 3.2 since 3.3 is now the way of the future though, so I'm upgrading all m'projects before doing anything else.

Speaking of new APIs, the new release means that there are new reference docs. The documentation is part of the help system, which renders the JavaDocs and whatnot via the help browser, but I like putting many of these things on my local web server so I can browse them more easily with a normal web browser. I can never remember where to find them, so this is for posterity: the JavaDocs and extension docs are in the 'reference' directory inside org.eclipse.platform.doc.isv_3.3.0.v20070621.jar, in the plugins directory.