Microsoft is providing insights into what it has planned for Java in Visual Studio Code through the end of 2021.
One area of focus will be on improving the fundamental development experience, which includes investing in better code completion and navigation, package import, compiling, debugging, and testing. The company is also planning to improve how Visual Studio Code handles projects of large scale and complicated structures.
It is also working to improve support for build tools, such as Gradle. The initial set of Gradle features will include those related to task management and file authoring. It will also continue improving the Maven experience by adding new capabilities like profile switching.
Microsoft will add support for more Java versions and the Spring framework in Remote Development. It will also provide support for Java language extensions in GitHub Codespaces.
Developers will soon be able to use new Testing APIs in Visual Studio Code as well. “This means when Java developers are dealing with tests in Visual Studio Code, they will not only be able to use a user interface with richer display of outputs, but also gain access to more testing metrics such as testing coverage,” Nick Zhu, senior program manager, developer division at Microsoft, wrote in a post.
Another focus is to improve developer productivity and the debugging experience. It will enable virtual threading through Project Loom to help with this goal, the company explained.
The final area detailed in the roadmap is security. It is introducing a new Workspace Trust feature that will enable developers to determine if their project should allow or restrict code execution. “As a start, when you open Java projects in untrusted workspaces, the Java language server will run in a restricted mode and provide limited support,” Zhu wrote.
