After December's first peek at Red Hat's JVM language, hype surrounding it has reached a new level, as this week saw the first Ceylon IDE milestone appear to the public.

The language, created by Hibernate's Gavin King and sponsored by Red Hat, has been dubbed as 'the alternative to Java'. The M1 Newton gives the user an opportunity to get to grips with what the language can do with the release of an official specification compiler. Code can be compiled into bytecode then executed on the JVM.

The Ceylon IDE project was initiated by David Festal at French software company, SERLI. The Eclipse plugin, compatible with Indigo install, provides the following features according to the Ceylon Documentation:

• Ceylon perspective
• Incremental compilation and interactive error reporting
• Run / Debug
• Customizable syntax highlighting
• Outline view and popup outline
• Popup type hierarchy
• Error reporting in Problems view and error annotations in editor
• Reporting of //todo and //fix in Tasks view and task annotations in editor
• Intelligent proposals
• Documentation hover
• Hyperlink navigation to declarations
• Auto indentation and Correct Indentation
• New wizards: New Ceylon Unit, New Ceylon Project, New Ceylon Module, and New Ceylon Package
• Cross-project dependencies and navigation, and support for external module repositories
• Export Ceylon Module to Module Repository wizard
• And much, much more

As with a lot of breakaway languages, Ceylon aims for immutability by default. The release of an official IDE is a huge step towards Ceylon being accepted into the JVM fraternity: only through an IDE can a language truly reach a level of acceptable adoption. The fact it's an Eclipse plugin helps matters, giving it a bountiful supply of toolchains such as EGit and Subclipse, although at this early stage, Ant and Maven aren't yet available.

You can find the code at the Github Ceylon page as well as at the Ceylon website. So, if you're intrigued by Red Hat's JVM attempt, now is a perfect time to test out the assets behind Ceylon as you have the perfect playground to play in. Keep an eye on Ceylon in the next few months - more nuggets are promised.

1326721680 January 16, 2012

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