Friday, September 28, 2007

TM 2.0.1: Can a Terminal be too fast?

The Eclipse DSDP Target Management project just released its 2.0.1 service release with Europa SR1.

This release includes more than 150 bug fixes for seamless editing of remote files over SSH, FTP or other protocols, which many users have learned to like particularly for editing remote web servers.

What's new is that non-ASCII Encodings for file and path names in foreign languages now work properly; the Eclipse Filesystem (EFS) provider got a lot more stable, especially over FTP; and, in my opinion the pearl of this release, the Terminal got lightning fast (up to 1000 times faster on Windows, thanks to Michael Scharf's new implementation).

Can a Terminal be too fast? - When working remotely on build.eclipse.org and I'm browsing a remote file, it now scrolls so fast that I'm almost not sure whether it scrolled or not. That's a little bit strange at first, but thanks to the big buffer I can still view everything that got displayed. Awesome, Michael!

For more information, read the build notes. To grab it, just use the Download Page or get it with Update Manager from the Europa Discovery Site.

For things beyond plain remote file editing, and particularly more embedded things, the TM project made plans at its recent Face-to-face meeting in Toronto. The vision is to be the Eclipse "Explorer of the Network Neighborhood", with pluggable information providers under a single, consistent UI and a lot auto-discovery going on. Want to learn more about what's coming up? - If you happen to be at Eclipse Summit Europe just 10 days from now, drop in at my talk: The DSDP Target Management Project, Wednesday at 2:30 pm; or, join Doug Gaff's Systems Engineering for Device Software Development Symposium on Tuesday (requires registration by E-Mail with Doug).