Monday, November 23, 2009

Eclipse Plugins that I use.

I’ve been using the Spring Source Tool Suite (STS) every since they released it to open source. STS is a very good version of Eclipse with many cool Spring tools rolled into it. However, there are some plugins that I like to add to make my development a little easier.

The first one that I load is the Infinitest plugin (http://eclipse.infinitest.org) . This plugin used to be free but they made it free for only non-commercial development however, it is the single biggest development booster when it comes to TDD development. I could argue for a while about the pricing model that they adopted for commercial development but if you can get your company to flip for the high cost it is a great plugin.

Next I usually load in a few bug detectors. Findbugs (http://findbugs.cs.umd.edu/eclipse) and checkstyle (http://eclipse-cs.sf.net/update) . Eventually I’ll end up using just one of these type of detectors but both are good for certain type of issues. Checkstyle is highly configurable and can enforce a coding style and findbugs can locate more issues than the internal Java code checker. STS already has PMD loaded by default which I also use at times. Now if I could just get my co-workers to start using them…

Now I load up some persistence plugins. IBator (http://ibatis.apache.org/tools/ibator) is nice sometimes when working with IBatis development to generate some code and Hibernate Tools (http://download.jboss.org/jbosstools/updates/stable) I sometimes use for some hibernate development. However, I think that Spring Roo will take over for most of the work that I do with Hibernate Tool very soon. If you haven’t really looked at Spring Roo yet you should. In fact stop reading this right now and go do it! But don’t forget to come back and finish reading my blog… :)

Lastly, I usually load up Subeclipse (http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.6.x) I like Subeclipse for SVN maintenance more than Subversion so far. They both look good but I started out using Subeclipse and haven’t had any problems so far.

Well that’s about it. Any plugins that you load that I don’t? Let me know why you use them.

1 comment:

gd007 said...

Findbug is great! Good post Brian.

--Gautam
http://fast-code.sourceforge.net/