I’ve been a big fan of Eclipse for quite while now and every now and again I find a new feature that gets me more excited about Eclipse just a bit more.

The other day when I was working on this project I noticed in the Team folder of the right-click (context) menu of a file, the Local History option. I’d actually seen this option many times before but I never took any notice of it. The other day however I decided to click on it. When I did a tab opened that showed me some sort of history of the file I had selected when I selected the option. It was, not to my surprise, a local history of the file. Every time I had saved my file, Eclipse has kept a previous copy of it. Local History turns out to be a super undo. Awesome!

Now, Local History is not like version control. Local History is much more low level than that. Basically, Local History is your version control between commits. Sort of.

After discovering Local History I decided to have another quick peek at the other menu options. After a bit of clicking around I noticed that when I right clicked a folder, the option Restore From Local History… appeared. And just like the title implied, you can actually bring back deleted files. Not only that, you can actually select which version from the Local History of that file you’d like to bring back.

All in all, again I’m pretty impressed with Eclipse. If you happen to know any cool Eclipse features, please let me know!

Once in a while I get requests or bug reports for flex2ant. Like the other day, I received a request for a fix of this one bug from two different people. Apparently a blog had popped up that discuses flex2ant (amonst other things). I knew that the problem in question was caused due to operating system differences but I didn’t really have the time to look into the problem.

When I received the second email explaining the issue I decided to have a look at it because the problem was starting annoy me. It didn’t annoy me that people report bugs, but the fact that there was a problem with flex2ant. And since I always try to fix bugs to code ASAP instead of pushing it forward, I loaded up up Eclipse, synchronized the project with the Subversion repository to be sure I had the latest copy and fixed the issue in about 2 min. Updating the website however, took me about 10 min.

So, there you go. If you’re a flex2ant user then get your new copy from the download area of the website. Happy Flexing!

I’ve been working with Eclipse now for a couple of years. At first I really had trouble understanding Eclipse. Most of us new to Eclipse do. At first I was perceiving Eclipse as just another text editor where you could just drag a source file into Eclipse for a quick edit. I was always quite upset when doing something, seemingly as simple, as this didn’t seem to be that easy.

Over the years I’ve come to understand Eclipse for what it really is. A Rich Applications Platform. Many among us still think of or see Eclipse as a development tool. And while this is true, the development tool that is Eclipse is in fact just a Rich Application that runs on top of Eclipse.

With this knowledge we can start taking Eclipse to a completely new level. Let me give you an example. Nowadays it’s quite common to have a web based CMS system. The problem with web based applications, like a CMS system, is usually not so much of what is technically possible but just the shear amount of time it takes to build them. If you build a web based application you’d easily spend 80% of your time building the UI (the HTML, CSS and JavaScript). Why not build this CMS application as an Eclipse application? If you do so, you don’t have to worry about any real visual design (on which everyone has a opinion) because your application will use the Eclipse UI.

A CMS can still be considered a development tool. What if we take it another step further. An Office suite that runs inside Eclipse. This may sound silly at first first but imagine the possibilities. Your application is not only cross platform but also update-able through the internet through a well proven mechanism. And you can even integrate it with other applications that run on Eclipse because of the unified interface that Eclipse provides.

And while we’re at it. Why not port Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash and the whole bunch to the Eclipse platform? It could very well be that this is where its going. Is Eclipse going to be the application platform of the future?