Well it is very early to say how this release will do, but till now I am impressed. What are the plugins you want to install to make it a perfect platform for J2EE development is a question of personal preference, but there are some plugins you would not want to miss out, if you have not been using them already. The best place to search for plugins is definitely the Eclipse Marketplace right from the Help menu of Eclipse IDE.
Note : All the links below on the title of the tool will actually take you to the update site of those plugins. So you can just copy those urls to add new repositories to eclipse and don't worry where to find them or you can search all the tools mentioned below in Eclipse Marketplace.
- Find Bugs : Find Bugs is a plugin no body would want to miss out. It will help to point out pitfalls of java. Some of the popular pitfalls described on java puzzlers are definitely the ones that no one would want to fall into.
- Spring Tools : Though Spring has gone from nasty xml configurations to annotations, there are times when you want to avoid those annotations and stick to xmls when you want to add project wide behaviors like in aop, security etc. This tool will help you configure those xmls easily. It is also a tool to install support for other frameworks like roo, groovy, grails etc. Spring Tools update is a big update. So if you have downloaded the update archive for spring tools like "springsource-tool-suite-2.6.1.RELEASE-e3.6-updatesite" then you don't have to re download it. To use this archive however download the bookmarks.xml file for this release. Disable all the previously enabled Software Sites (Install/Update -> Available Software Sites) and import this file. Then you can either update spring tools from internet or use above archive to install the tools.
- JavaScript Development Tools (JQuery) :Netbeans and Visual Studio has this feature on default installation, but we are talking about Eclipse right!. If we wanted to have jquery autocompletion on eclipse we had to have those huge installation from Aptana. Not anymore. However to enable jquery feature you have to enable it in every project. To do that right click the project and go to properties for that project. Expand javascript tab on left and go to include path. In the Libraries section of Include Path click on Add JavaScript Library select jQuery Library. If you want to select any specific version click next. From the next wizard window select specific version and click finish.
Now you can have those $(document).ready(function(){}); statements with auto-completion.
- Subeclipse : You don't want to lose those old code which you wiped out in enthusiasm, so that you could do it again and just dropped the whole idea of redoing when hit by a nasty bug you introduced this time, do you? If you don't then why don't you install svn(VisualSVN for windows, default from repo for linux) server and this tool on your computer and update the code before experimenting with your code. Right click your project and go to Team -> Share Project and enter the url you specified in server.
As you can see I have created a repository called snippets to store some cool Java Projects. In which I have the default branches, tags, and trunk directories. Since I have no branches I am working in trunk, so I have copied that URI (don't use url anymore in java) in the clipboard and then copied it on the window that says "Enter Repository Location Information" in eclipse. Then I go to next page and leave the default option "Use project name as folder name" to create separate directories for each project.
After I finish this step if I now go to Team option in eclipse I don't see Share Project anymore. This place is replaced with wealth of functionalists you would want in any svn gui client. At this time certainly you would want to commit your initial import with the well known "initial import" comment, wouldn't you?
- Maven : If you have to download open source java projects, this is the first thing you would want to install. You can't escape the almighty pom.xml file. If you did, no one would talk with you in facebook or read your tweet. I actually do hate maven, but there are times when you have to deal and work together with persons or tools you hate the most. My hate for Maven is not because of maven itself, but because I don't have a great internet service. I don't want some tool to foolishly download anything other than things I would wanna watch, so I hate maven.
- Glassfish : First thing you would want to search after tomcat constantly feeds you with permgen error is glassfish. Your thought might be why don't you increase the size of apache altogether, but glassfish is not just another alternative server. You start it once and don't have to bother to restart it again the whole day. Your clean from Project shall do the rest. If you did clean constantly in tomcat it would definitely remind you to restart the server with that nasty memory error.
- Code Coverage : When I installed it 3 or 4 years back I thought it was some sort of theme for highlighting the code in eclipse. Since I did not like the green lines I uninstalled it. Recently I have used it and believe me, it has helped to find bugs in my code. Though it does not say ok, look here is the bug go and remove it, but by looking at the code that did not execute I could find out certain blocks did not execute. If I assumed that the block would execute at some point when my condition out of millions would be correct just one time and if it did not, seriously I have a bug in may java program. I have to go and watch Harry Potter Deathly Hallows 2 twice after it releases. Now comes the most confusing part. Since I have two tools to suggest from I did not introduce them this long. One is the popular (even comes in popular section of Eclipse Marketplace) one called EclEmma and another you have to search called eCobertura . The one that I thought theme back then was EclEmma and the one that helped me find bugs is eCobertura, but since I don't require any advanced features of any one them I will definitely go for the popular choice (i.e EclEmma) for now and it looks cool too.
- Checkstyle : Enabling this some times is quite annoying, because it suggests all those nasty things we would not want to check in a java program. But after you think you have finished all you coding you would definitely want to pass it via Checkstyle to enable some sort of standard to your code (you may ignore most). One annoying thing I faced with this is that it suggested to insert a curly brace to for loop, even I would not if I had only one statement to execute for that for loop. From settings you would even want to disable some javadoc and other nuisance from Checkstyle -> Properties. Before you edit the properties you may want to make a copy of the setting you would want to edit Checkstyle Preferences page and edit and make default that one.
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