As we talked about earlier this year, Microsoft remains committed to supporting non-Microsoft languages and frameworks within their tooling Eco-system. This September brings about a substantial amount of features for Java developers. Let’s go through some few features being rolled out for Java within Visual Studio Code and GitHub.
Maven Improvements
Maven project creation has been improved with some flexibility around what actions are triggered after a project is created. The previous behavior is still in place and is called “interactive”, this option will always prompt the user to select an action. However now developers can set the default actions to “open” or “add to workspace”. Never heard of Maven? Check out the official repository for more information.
Large Projects Support
Today even enthusiasts have to deal with very large and complex projects, and as you can imagine, nobody likes to wait around for projects to load and run. Although not quite solved yet, the team is aware of the poor performance when dealing with large and complex projects. This is great news as we know a solution is in the works and surely not too far off.
Spring Support on GitHub Codespaces
Yes I know what you are probably thinking; what in the world are you talking about, spring is not for another 6 months. However that’s not exactly the type of Spring support I am talking about here. For those that don’t know, Spring is an application framework which gives developers a ton of out of the box functionality for building modern scalable Java based applications. Well now that you know, Microsoft through a partnership with VMWare has brought Spring support to GitHub Codespaces.
GitHub Codespaces opens up a world of possibilities for developers, no longer do you need a powerful laptop to build, debug and run complex projects. For a very fair fee you can now write, debug and run your code in the cloud, on extremely powerful hardware if you are willing to pay a bit extra. You can learn more about Spring support on GitHub Codespaces here.
To learn more about Java on Visual Studio Code, check out Microsoft’s official documentation and to learn about more of these cool features being released for Visual Studio Code, check out the this awesome blog post by Nick Zhu.
