Xtext M7 - New & Noteworthy

Last week was the last milestone (M7) for this year's release train (Galileo). We're pretty happy with the result. It's in a much better shape than what was available after M6 as we cleaned up a number of things and fixed many bugs.

Besides that Xtext now supports lazy linking, the content assist framework has been overhauled and finally is in a shape we're very happy with. In addition M7 enables template proposals (including corresponding preference page) for all languages without the need for any extra programming or configuration. Also the preference page for syntax coloring now works as expected.
Finally we made some progress regarding the EMF Index.

See the New & Noteworthy document for the whole list of changes in M7.

Xtext now contains all features and concepts we wanted it to have in the final release.
There will be five release candidates (RC) before the final build will be made available:

RC1	05/19/2009
RC2	05/26/2009
RC3	06/02/2009
RC4	06/09/2009
RC5	06/16/2009
0.7.0	06/28/2009

We'll spend the next weeks on improving the overall user experience. This includes things like

• Documentation
• Website
• Wizards
• UI polishing
• minor code clean ups
• Bug fixing
  

In order to allow you helping us ;-), we've prepared a set of Galileo M7 distros containing everything necessary to get started with Xtext. The zips can be downloaded from itemis' website:

• eclipse-SDK-3.5M7-xtext-0.7M7-win32.zip
• eclipse-SDK-3.5M7-xtext-0.7M7-macosx-carbon.tar.gz
• eclipse-SDK-3.5M7-xtext-0.7M7-macosx-cocoa.tar.gz
• eclipse-SDK-3.5M7-xtext-0.7M7-linux-gtk.tar.gz
  

Any feedback is as always highly appreciated. Have fun!