Ceylon 1.3.0 is a major release of the Ceylon language, with over 330 issues closed. This is the first release of Ceylon which supports Android development, the Node Package Manager (npm), and Wildfly Swarm.

• For the JVM, this release is backwards-compatible with all releases of Ceylon 1.2 (1.2.0 to 1.2.2).

• For JavaScript, this release is backwards-compatible only with the previous release (1.2.2).

Ceylon IDE 1.3.0 is now available for the two leading Java development environments:

• for the very first time, as a plugin for IntelliJ IDEA and Android Studio, alongside
• existing support for the Eclipse platform.

Ceylon IDE for IntelliJ was designed for high performance in large projects with many Java dependencies, and is currently the best-performing IDE for Ceylon.

Changes

Enhancements to the language and command-line distribution include:

• support for developing Android applications
• support for importing modules from npm and for publishing Ceylon modules to npm
• support for developing microservices with WildFly Swarm
• cross-platform services, abstracting the Java service loader
• addition of the fat-jar tool for packaging a Ceylon program and its dependencies into a single assembly
• much slimmer runtime
• destructuring for parameters of anonymous functions
• destructuring in cases of a switch
• addition of the CorrespondenceMutator interface
• addition of Collection.combinations()
• small and since annotations
• many minor improvements to interoperation with Java
• experimental support for Java APT processors
• improved behavior for is tests with generic Java types
• correct typing for things annotated @Nullable/@NotNull in Java
• full support for Java 8
• reduced typechecker memory footprint

Naturally, the release incorporates many more bugfixes, minor enhancements, and performance improvements.

Support for Docker

Docker images for Ceylon are now available, making it very easy to run Ceylon programs in a Docker container.

IDE Changes

Ceylon IDE for IntelliJ is a brand-new development tool for IntelliJ IDEA and Android Studio, featuring incremental error reporting, code completion, basic refactoring, many intention actions, sophisticated navigation, searching, type hierarchy and file structure, online documentation, full integration with Ceylon Herd and much, much more.

Ceylon IDE for IntelliJ is written mostly in Ceylon, and reuses the Ceylon IDE Common project, the core of Ceylon IDE for Eclipse, which was completely rewritten in Ceylon.

Almost 60 issues were fixed in Ceylon IDE for Eclipse, and code completion was redesigned around a non-blocking approach which is much more responsive in large projects. In addition, improvements to the typechecker have resulted in significantly lower memory usage.

SDK Changes

Exactly 40 issues affecting the Ceylon SDK have been fixed.

Migration from Ceylon 1.2.2

Ceylon 1.3.0 is backward-compatible with Ceylon 1.2.2, and so it's not necessary to recompile or change dependencies. However, upgrading to version 1.3.0 of any Ceylon platform module is recommended.