Ronalds Blog

I know, I know, I'm the n'th guy with a list about Eclipse plugins. But blogging about installing Eclipse plugins can't really go without a list of the plugins I actually use, and can't live without. Besides, if no one cares, I still have a good reference list when configuring a new workstation :).

Profile

Well, I'm mainly a Java programmer, but I like to do some side work in PHP. Furthermore I'm not a person that wants as much functionality as possible into my IDE, just a few things to make my life easier. Almost all development I do is web development, so JavaScript is pretty important as well.

The List

1. SpringIDE

Since I use Spring a lot, it's nice to have some support for it. Especially when editing the XML files with my beans.
[ Website ] - [ Eclipse update site ]

2. JBoss Tools

I use it mainly for Hibernate support, but the RichFaces and Seam support are also welcome. JBoss descripbes it's Hibernate support as:

Supporting mapping files, annotations and JPA with reverse engineering, code completion, project wizards, refactoring, interactive HQL/JPA-QL/Criteria execution and more.In short a merger of Hibernate Tools and Exadel ORM features.

[ Website ] - [ Eclipse update site ]

3. JSEclipse

Like I said, I do a fair amount of JavaScript. Mostly using JQuery. JSEclipse was aquired by Adobe and freely available. Especially the auto completion features that I'm used to when coding in Java is a great help when working with JavaScript. Unfortunately there is no update site for eclipse, which would be a great improvement from Adobe. You also need a (free) Adobe account, that's probably the reason why they have no update site. That may be a showstopper for some people, but I consider it acceptable because the plugin is really good.
[ Website ]

4. Subclipse

I doubted a bit about putting this on my list. I actually prefer doing my Subversion administration with TortoiseSVN and even commandline. So why did I put this plugin on my list? I do like to see the history and the status of my source fields in my IDE. And I've come to realize that's someting I don't want to miss, and thus making it to my list.
[ Website ] - [ Eclipse update site ]

5. PHP Development Tools

Or short, PDT. Well, I mentioned my programming in PHP, and using PDT I can still use Eclipse. It might not be interesting for the Java developers out there, but still worth mentioning when you need to do some PHP work.
[ Website ] - [ Eclipse update site ]

What about you?

I know this is a very subjective topic, but everyone has some favorite plugins. So let me know what plugins you really like, and recommend me using, because tools are meant to make our lives easier, and I am always looking for ways to accomplish that.

Somewhere between the obligations of Christmas I decided it was time to make sure Wordpress was running correctly. There were a couple of things I needed to do. First of all authentication, but elaborating on that probably isn't the smartest idea. The other thing was making sure we could post some nicely formatted code, being after all a software company. There were two nice plugins I could find, Google Code Prettify for wordpress, which is basically a wrapper around Google Code Prettify (examples). The second plugin which looked promising was WordPress:CodeHighlighterPlugin (examples), which was a wrapper around GeSHi. Let's find out what they do, and how they do it.
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Today the keynote started with a trailer of the movie we're going to watch tonight: Beowulf. If you like the genre it's probably a great movie, and since I do like the genre I'm really looking forward to it. After the trailer Bruce Eckel and James Ward did the same they did Monday, talking about, and showing how to code Flex. It was actually fun to see it again a bit shorter. Bruce really know what an audience wants and makes a great team with James. I'll probably watch it on Parleys again. More about that when you read further. Bruce and James did show some new things which they did not showed before. A cool demo with an opensource component that allowed you to watch a book and flip through transparent pages. For example an overlay of organs over a sheet of the human body. It looked really slick. Something I did not know before, was the fact Flex can use multiple cores when rendering. It really speeds things up on multicore machines.
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Day three of JavaPolis, the first conference day. A long keynote and one hour sessions afterwards.

The keynote started with a welcome of Stephan Janssen, the organizer of JavaPolis. Bruce Eckel told a bit about Open Space, and the rest of the keynote it was mostly James Gosling. James presented some statistics and figures of Java users and downloads, and encouraged everyone to visit dev.java.net more often. When talking about mobile devices James said something quite funny:

You can even use COBOL on a mobile device, but you you're probably pretty sick when you do that. But hey, we're in Belgium, right?

Another point of interest is NetBeans 6.0. I have been playing around with it a couple of days now, but apparently today is the official release. It has a lot of improvements and works a lot smoother. Also it has support for a lot of languages out of the box.
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The second day of JavaPolis is packed with interesting sessions again. I choose to attend two desktop/ria university sessions. One about Flex, and one about JavaFX. I never played around with both, but I knew Flex is much more mature than JavaFX.
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Today JavaPolis really started. The first and second day are filled with university sessions and tools in action sessions. University sessions are 3 hours with a small break, so there's time for two. At the end of the day there is time for two tools in action sessions, which take about half an hour each. The first session started at 9.30, which gave us the ability to get a good night of sleep.
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JavaPolis is probably the biggest Java conference in Europe. Last year I was unable to attend, so I was quite looking forward to it this year. Traveling from Groningen to Antwerpen with stops in Assen and Lemmer (not geographically logical) we arrived at the hotel around 22.00. We had a couple of Belgium beers and went to bed early to get some sleep for the real event.The coming days I will post some information on the sessions I attend.