Friday, March 21, 2014

Release of Whole Language Workbench - Kepler SR2 for Java 8 Edition

Following the official release of Java 8we are pleased to announce that an updated milestone release of the Whole Language Workbench is publicly available.

The Eclipse IDE 4.3.2 with the feature patch to support Java 8 is bundled with the all-in-one product distribution.
The Java 8 represents a big step forward for the Java community and we want to be able to take full advantage of its features; so we decided to make Java 8 the required execution environment for the Whole Language Workbench.

A few years ago, following the release of Java 5 we redesigned the Whole Platform to adopt generics. For more than a year, we introduced a few workarounds in our code in order to be able to compile with both the official Java compiler and the one bundled with Eclipse JDT. 

Yesterday, we had to perform a few code changes, just to be able to rebuild our platform with Java 8 instead of Java 7. I am not able to tell you how much of them are due to changes in the Language specification; but the two compilers have reported a small different set of errors.

The news is that even if the history had to repeat itself, we encourage you to start using Java 8 today and we join in thanking both Oracle and the Eclipse Foundation for the great job they have already done.

Friday, March 14, 2014

Release of Whole Language Workbench - Kepler SR2 Edition

Today, we are pleased to announce that the new milestone release of the Whole Language Workbench is publicly available.

The Eclipse IDE 4.3.2 is bundled with the all-in-one product distribution.
This is the first major release based on the e4 platform; all the code needed to run on older versions of Eclipse has been removed and is no longer supported.

We completed the factorization of the e4 compatibility layer to enable full e4 product generation. This facilitate the creation of e4 RCP applications that leverage the Whole Platform, including the language workbench itself as soon as the dependent plugins will be migrated to e4.

We have bundled two new web related DSLs: JSON and HTML5 each having a specific persistence backed by an external library (Jackson and Validator.nu respectively).

New and exciting features are awaiting to surprise you at the Language Workbench Challence 2014 don't miss the dates.


As usual, both binaries and source code are available:

  • SourceForge archives here.
  • GitHub Platform source here and Examples source here.