redredred

It has been quite a while since I posted on Eclipse plugins I am using. All the URLs have changed and so have many of the plugins I find essential for development. Here is an update on the plugins I recommended last time and the ones I’m using now:

1. MyEclipse: I have ditched this as an unstable, annoying, and largely useless waste of money. Ganymede WST provides all the Sever hot deploy stuff that was good in the older MyEclipse editions out of the box, most of the rest can be found in various free  plugins I will detail here. When I was working mostly in Windows or Linux this plugin was okay, but on the Mac MyEclipse crashes almost constantly and is a complete time waster. Virtually nothing interesting, which might save you money even works on the Mac, ie. UML, Javascript debug, image editing. Also the new installer is crap… I’m over these guys, $60/yr is a nice price point for a useful plugin set but really this is worse than useless if you are a Mac user.
2. Spring IDE – If you are doing Spring development you cannot live without this plugin. Provides Spring configuration validation and help with code completion. URL: http://springide.org/updatesite/
3. Subclipse: I have trashed this. The conflict resolution was kind of buggy and failure prone. Maybe it was operator error, but I got sick of trying to manage broken merges and migrated to Subversive.
4. Subversive: This is becoming the Eclipse default SVN plugin. Why Ganymede does not have an SVN plugin out of the box is beyond me, is anyone still using CVS these days??? The only downside of Subversive is that it is slightly tricky to install as the install instruction have you jumping all over the web to get the update site urls for the connectors and the actual plugin. Here is the long and the short of it…
   1. Plugin site URL:http://download.eclipse.org/technology/subversive/0.7/update-site/
   2. Connector site URL: http://www.polarion.org/projects/subversive/download/eclipse/2.0/update-site/

   If you are using OS X or Linux you will need to unselect some of the windows JavaHL connectors

5. M2Eclipse: This plugin has really come a long way since it was released a year or so ago. Previously the only useful thing about it was the repository search. Now it allows quite reasonable management of your Maven 2 project from within Eclipse. For those afraid of editing XML the new pom editor is really useful. I still don’t think the integration is quite as seamless as IntelliJ but it is now quite acceptable. URL: http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org/update/
6. Eclemma is still the best free coverage plugin I am aware of. Again it is annoying that the IntelliJ emma integration is more seamless and intuitive but the Eclipse integration is quite workable. I had troubles installing this on Ubuntu, although it installed fine on my Mac. If you have problems it is quite simple to go to the eclemma site (www.eclemma.org) and download it. Unzip it and drop the contents of the plugin/ and features/ folders into their respective folders under your eclipse installation. URL: http://update.eclemma.org/
7. PMD: This plugin is very handy for getting quick feedback on code style. We have been using PMD for a while and have a company ruleset.xml. I like the way you can prioritize problems and then filter by priority in the IDE, but I am still in 2 minds as to whether this is actually better than Checkstyle. URL:  http://pmd.sourceforge.net/eclipse