Installing Eclipse: Some of my Favourite Plug-ins
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Join For Free- Download the latest Eclipse EE package (in this case, Ganymede SR1).
- Update the pre-installed plugins to the latest version.
- Install Subclipse (http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.4.x) - very cool support for Subversion 1.5 branching and merging.
- I skip the AJDT plugin, as I don't use AspectJ for my current projects. If you are, you might want to include this one to benefit from the maven-aspectj-plugin integration.
- Install M2Eclipse (http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org/update-dev/) - note this is the dev snapshot - I like living dangerously ;-).
I'm a big fan of code quality and code metrics, so I add the standard code quality-related plugins:
- Checkstyle (http://eclipse-cs.sourceforge.net/update)
- PMD (http://pmd.sourceforge.net/eclipse)
- FindBugs (http://findbugs.cs.umd.edu/eclipse/)
- ECLEmma (http://update.eclemma.org/) - nice light-weight code coverage from within Eclipse
- (and/or) Clover (http://update.atlassian.com/eclipse/clover) - if you are serious about code coverage ;-)
I do occasionally do some work in Groovy in Eclipse (though IntelliJ is nicer on this front), so I add some Groovy support:
- Groovy Eclipse plugin (http://dist.codehaus.org/groovy/distributions/update/)
I like to monitor my CI servers from within my IDE. For Hudson, I use this one:
- Hudson Eclipse plugin (http//hudson-eclipse.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/hudson-update/)
I'm not adverse to a bit of commercial software, if it improves my productivity and doesn't require me to take out another mortgage. So I may well install the following commercial plugins:
- JUnitMax (the tool is still a bit rough in parts, but those unit test failures marked with red crosses, just like compilation failures, really are quite addictive).
- Tasktop (sort of like Mylyn on steroids)
With this, I have an operational development environment. I might install others as the need arises, but this gets me up and running in Eclipse with a minimum of fuss.
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