I've been a user of Eclipse for many years now and when I saw there was a free t-shirt to be had by reviewing the newest release there was only one choice to make. :)

The download is exactly the same as all previous releases but the first thing that struck me was the startup time. Granted I have no plugins installed yet, but Eclipse was up in just a few seconds and that already has me excited. Performance has always been the biggest problem in Eclipse and if they've made major strides in that direction I'm a happy camper.

Granted this is RC4, but immediately after downloading and unzipping I checked for updates and it spend the next 5 minutes downloading a pretty large update to the Eclipse SDK and made me restart when it was done. Again, RC4, so lets just hope the actual releases are up-to-date. :)

Installing MercurialEclipse and the Scala plugin went smoothly and I went to pull down Sgine (http://sgine.googlecode.com) and all was fine except Scala can't seem to build the project correctly. My guess is this is a bug in the Scala plugin with Helios.

After spending a bit more time with it I haven't really seen much difference in 3.6 and 3.5 apart from some performance improvements. However, performance alone is a very worthwhile feature.

Well, this is a great title for this post not only as it's the first blog post I've made here in seven months, but I've also had the song from Portal stuck in my head lately. :)

Looking at my blog it would be easy to classify me as MIA but I've actually been quite busy in the open-source and have even been blogging quite a bit lately, just not here, but I'll get to that in a minute.

First of all, my very basic last post talking about the entry-level learning I was doing with Scala was quite fitting as my last post as very shortly after that post I made a complete shift from Java to Scala programming. With this came the abandoning of lots of open-source projects I've either created (like jSeamless) or been a developer on (like jMonkeyEngine). I believe so strongly in Scala that I've shifted everything I possibly can to Scala.

Second, with the shift I've made to Scala and all the projects I've abandoned as a result, one new project has come to being that, in many ways, embodies much of the vision I've had for several projects I've left behind. That project is called "sgine" (Scala Engine). I've been developing on it for a while now and have made some major strides recently and finally wanted to make a re-appearance on my blog to hopefully start posting here again.

Now, at the beginning of this post I said that I've been blogging elsewhere. If you go to http://www.sgine.org you'll see that it's a blog filled up with posts regarding updates to the engine I've been developing. I'm really excited about this project and though many people have accused me of abandoning Java...and realistically that's pretty much what I've done...I haven't a regret for switching to Scala, it's such an incredibly powerful language and has renewed my vigor in programming. For anyone considering looking into a new language I cannot recommend it enough.