Ceylon, RedHat’s strongly statically typed language for the JVM, has reached version 1.3. Released one year after version 1.2, Ceylon 1.3 is a major release bringing Android support, npm integration, and a plugin for IntelliJ IDEA and Android Studio, in addition to new language features and improvements.
Being able to compile to JavaScript, Ceylon has long supported the creation of hybrid mobile apps for iOS and Android, for example using Apache Cordova. New in Ceylon 1.3 is stable support for building native apps on Android, a feature which became first available early this year through nightly builds.
Related to this, Ceylon 1.3 introduces a new plugin for Android Studio and IntelliJ IDEA, which goes alongside with existing support for development using Eclipse. The new plugin includes support for contextual completion, refactoring, source code navigation, and online documentation integration.
Other interesting new features are npm integration, which will make it possible to easily import modules from npm as well as publish modules to npm; and, support for developing microservices using WildFly Swarm through a CLI plugin.
On the language front, Ceylon 1.3 brings destructuring for parameters of anonymous functions, additions to the CorrespondenceMutator and Collection.combinations, experimental support for Java APT processors, and more than 330 issues closed.
Ceylon 1.3 is backward-compatible with Ceylon 1.2.2 and does not require recompiling or changing dependencies.
Ceylon is a statically typed programming language for the Java and JavaScript virtual machines. It provides a flow-sensitive static type system, where the inferred type of a variable may change while traversing control flow statements, and other advanced features such as optionals, union and intersection types, reified generics, etc.