The new Eclipse 4.3 release, also known as Kepler, is going to be released and along with it will be available the new version of the Eclipse e4 Application Development Tools.

For those who want to begin looking at the new cool features here is where to start:

And here are some of the new features

Extracting a fragment from the Application Model

As showed in the tutorial How to contribute to an e4 application modularity in e4 can be obtained with fragments (declarative way) or with processors (programmatic way). The tutorial shows how to use the first way, creating a plug-in with a fragment file containing what will contribute in the form of a sub-tree of the Application Model.

This process consists in a sequence of steps in order to build the sub-tree itself and need particular attention when setting the various element ids.

With Kepler tools all this turns out to be extremely simple: you can just add new elements to the main application model and, with a context menu, extract the tree sub-part choosing the destination fragment file:

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The selected sub-tree will be then removed from the main application model and added to the target destination fragment, with proper ids.

If you already started working with e4 I can assure that you will definitely hardly do it without this cool new feature!

Importing 3.x handlers, commands, editors and views

Another very useful feature consists in allowing to reuse handlers, commands, editors, views and other tipical 3.x elements.
Let’s make an example: if you want to add a command in order to save a part, instead of creating it from scratch we can import it from a context menu on the Commands node:

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