I just installed Eclipse 3.5 (Galileo)—it seemed a more attractive thing to do than actually getting my work done. Fortunately, I only need three Eclipse plugins right now. Here is how they fared with Galileo.

1. The Scala plugin seems to work just fine, even though the plugin page ominously states “3.5 Milestone releases are not fully supported”
2. The Glassfish plugin works, but not in the same way as it did in Eclipse 3.4. In that version, you right-clicked on the Servers tab, selected New and then clicked the “Download additional server adapters” link. Following this tip, I instead added http://ajax.dev.java.net/eclipse to the update sites, which is a much more sensible way anyway. I never understood why there was a separate mechanism just for server adapters.
3. The Subclipse plugin also works as always. Actually, I tried the Subversive plugin first (which is a part of Eclipse), but it didn't pick up my existing SVN projects. I think this is because one has to download “connectors” from another site, as explained here. What's the point of having half of it a part of Eclipse? I guess I'll stick with Subclipse for a littler longer.

What did I have to show for my troubles? Not much, actually. Here are the three improvements that I noticed so far.

1. The icon now has a Java EE IDE banner, probably because people were always confused which version they had actually installed. Why they don't show it in the title bar is a mystery. Maybe in 3.6.
2. The code formatter now has an option Never join lines that makes Eclipse not move code or comments to different lines. That is useful if you don't want Eclipse to make a hash of your carefully aligned array initializations etc. Of course, it also means that you then have to manually reflow your javadoc comments, which doesn't sound like a win. Maybe in 3.6, they'll give us separate options for code and comments.
3. There is now an option to generate toString automatically. This is something I've wanted for a long time. Unfortunately, it is not very good. Core Java gives these simple rules for toString:
   • Use getClass().getName() to print the class name. Then your toString can be inherited.
   • When you redefine toString in a subclass, first call super.toString(), then add the subclass data.

   The Eclipse formatter follows neither of these eminently sensible rules. Maybe in 3.6.

Did I miss anything exciting? This and this and this review didn't have anything that looked it would change my life. Not a problem, of course. Eclipse is a great IDE and pretty mature at this point. If I could wish for something, it would be better support for JSF and Scala. Maybe in 3.6.