Hi everyone, welcome to the January edition of Visual Studio Code Java update! Since this is our first blog post of the new year, we are going to look back on highlights of 2021 and take a look at our roadmap for 2022! We also have some exciting feature updates so let us get started.
Highlights of 2021
2021 was a productive year for Java on Visual Studio Code. We have made substantial improvements on all extensions in the Extension Pack for Java. Among those achievements, we’d like to highlight a few important ones:
1.0 release of Language Support for Java™
In 2021, we released the official 1.0 version of Language Support for Java™ which marks a significant milestone and result of multi-year collaboration between Microsoft and Red Hat. This release contained many important features such as Java 17 support, easier type hierarchy lookup, source lookup, Gradle Kotlin (.kts) support and so on. In addition, we also made a series of optimization on code completion performance starting from version 0.78. As a result, we have seen a decrease of 60% of our average code completion response time.
Gradle for Java extension release
Gradle support has always been one of the top asks in the community. In October 2021, we officially released the “Gradle for Java” extension to address developer’s Gradle needs. The extension now has more than 230K downloads and we expect to continue to iterate on the extension.
New getting started experience
Better getting started experience is always one of the top priorities. In 2021, we have made several improvements in this area including a new in-product welcome experience for Java developers in Visual Studio Code. We also re-designed our welcome view and help center page so that newcomers can find the guidance they needed.
Various user experience improvements
Throughout 2021, numerous user experience improvements were also made to optimize the developer productivity overall. To name a few remarkable ones:
- Testing – Test Runner for Java adopted the new Testing UX from Visual Studio Code in order to offer a better testing experience in terms of feature, capability and ease of use.
- Project Management – We no longer generate .project metadata files in project root folder! This was one of the top community voted issues and we finally delivered a long awaited solution. Click here to see how we addressed the problem.
- Code actions – We added several features so that operations like getter/setter and construction generation were more easily accessed, and we will continue to make code actions more accessible.
Spring support in GitHub Codespaces
Besides the core Java extension releases, there were also exciting updates in remote development area. In September 2021, it was announced that Spring framework was fully enabled on GitHub Codespaces via partnership with VMWare. Developer can directly develop a Spring application seamless in a browser environment.
Please visit our past blogs to learn about all the improvements that we made through 2021.
User growth
In addition to product updates, we also witnessed the growth of our users during 2021. We now have more than 1.5 million users developing Java in VS Code. This is the result of continuous feedback from our users and it wouldn’t have been possible without the support from the community.
2022 Roadmap
Now onto the exciting part, let us talk about our roadmap for year 2022. Here is a picture that summarizes our investment areas.
