Eclipse Mars will ship on Wednesday June 24th. While Eclipse can be used for C, C++, JavaScript, PHP and many other languages, many people still consider Eclipse a Java IDE, and a pretty darn good one too. As we inch closer to the release, and I continue my countdown of the Top 10 Eclipse Mars features, we finally come to Java improvements.

Eclipse Luna (2014) shipped with Java 8 support, and this year the team expanded on that support.

There are quick fixes (ctrl+1) for creating method references from lambda expressions:

and vice versa:

Quick-fixes for inferring lambda parameter types are also available:

And several new templates have been added for things like try / finally and lock acquisition:

The JUnit view can now filter to only show skipped tests (nobody @ignores tests right?):

And static flow analysis has been improved in a number of areas.

Finally, while not technically part of the release, the Eclipse Java Development team has made early access builds for Java 9 support available from the Eclipse Marketplace.

Eclipse is certainly a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but at its heart, it’s still a great Java IDE.

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