Wolfram Workbench 2 is out today. New in Version 2 is the ability to create and integrate documentation for your Mathematica applications, as well as a host of improvements to code editing, navigation, and more.

Workbench is an Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDE) with a powerful suite of tools to help you quickly create innovative, next-generation applications from concept to completion. You can work with any Eclipse-supported language, making Workbench a very efficient organizational tool. It’s a powerful tool for small projects as well as large scale applications. How do we know? It is one of our key tools in the development of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha, and other Wolfram technologies.

Wolfram|Alpha has millions of lines of code that must interact and work together, and many different groups and team members working on the same code base. New features like version-control support let you check out a project, work on it, do tests, and then check code back into the global repository. This helps to keep all your work organized so whenever you return to your work, you can easily find your latest version.

You aren’t contemplating creating something as huge as Wolfram|Alpha? That’s OK—Workbench‘s senior developer, Adam Berry, explains how Workbench 2 can make your life a lot easier on any project: “The ability to develop for different technologies, through all stages of the development cycle, within one application significantly increases productivity. By removing the need to change environments, Workbench allows you to focus on your development instead of on your tools.”

One exciting feature of this release is that Workbench now includes functionality for authoring and building integrated Mathematica documentation for your applications. This means you can develop documentation and add it to your Mathematica Documentation Center. For example, you could easily integrate your application’s function, guide, and tutorial pages with existing Mathematica documentation.

To learn more about Workbench 2, check out its website or sign up for Wolfram Education Group training, which covers core Mathematica programming concepts like source code editing, debugging, and unit testing. Stay tuned to the Wolfram Blog for more information about Wolfram Workbench.