Nick Zhu form Senior Program Manager, Developer Division at Microsoft

Today, we are pleased to announce the 1.0 release of Language Server for Java™ on Visual Studio Code! This is a major milestone for Java in Visual Studio Code and the result of years of collaboration between Microsoft, Red Hat, and the entire community. Here we would like to thank all comments or contributions to the user, thank you!

Release window

When we started the first release, our goal was to provide the best Java development experience on Visual Studio Code. Since then, we’ve maintained a release cycle of 1-2 times a month, going through multiple iterations. In this 1.0 release, we want to highlight the following new features

17 support Java

We will always do our best to support the latest technologies provided by the Java language. In our 1.0 release, our Java plug-in now officially provides support for Java 17

Performance improvements

Performance improvements are another highlight of the release. Thanks to new features in the LSP specification, we were able to defer certain calculations, which gave us better performance in many scenarios. In addition, better default JVM options can be used to improve the user experience for larger and more complex projects. We also made subtle improvements in many specific scenarios to improve the responsiveness of the language server.

Class inheritance system

Now you can easily access class inheritance in Visual Studio Code! This is a feature we recently launched and has been one of the hottest demands in the Java community.

Library source location

Currently, we allow users to quickly locate the source code of a library, which is sometimes very useful. We have now extended its support to normal projects (that is, projects that do not use build tools). As long as the library comes from Maven Central Repo, we can parse its origin. More advanced configurations are also supported.

More code related operations

User experience is another area where we continue to improve. In the new release, we provide more code manipulation to optimize the user development experience

Gradle Kotlin (.kts) support

Although we already support Gradle projects with Groovy scripts, we keep hearing that the community needs better Kotlin support, so in this new release we provide some basic support for Kotlin. We hope to continue to expand this space and provide a great experience for Kotlin in the future

Visual Studio Code’s Java Journey

Language Server for Java™ is the foundation of the Java extension pack and provides the core experience of Java code editing, completion, refactoring, navigation, and more. Over the past few years, Microsoft and Red Hat have worked closely to continuously add new features to the language server. We’ve also been fine-tuning the performance of the language server and improving stability by fixing bugs and adding new features.

In addition to the main Java language support, we built various Java extensions based on the language server and extended the Java development experience on Visual Studio Code, including project management, build tool support for Maven/Gradle, better testing support, and more. The goal behind these efforts is to provide the best Java development experience on Visual Studio Code.

Looking to the future

In the future, we have many plans for Java language support on Visual Studio Code. Some of these include:

  • Makes it easier for users to configure the compiler’s error/warning and code format
  • More intelligent and useful code completion suggestions
  • Continue to provide more code-specific operations and eventually achieve the same functionality as other Java ides
  • Further improve the overall performance and startup time of the language server
  • Embed the Java Runtime directly in the plug-in to improve the overall hands-on experience

The 1.0 release of Language Server for Java™ is a major milestone for Java in Visual Studio Code, and we still have a long way to go. Microsoft and Red Hat continue to collaborate and invest in Java language support, and we are committed to providing a great Java development experience.

As always, your feedback is critical to our product improvements, so please don’t hesitate to try our products. You can click this link to start learning Java with Visual Studio Code or to get the latest Java plug-in package.