25 Feb, 2006

Eclipse and its plugins

Posted by ben 16:49 | Permalink Permalink | Comments comments (0) | Trackback Trackbacks (0) | Java

Eclipse is coming along extremely well as an IDE - but a lot of people are not finding the plugins that make it even better.

So as I was reinstalling Eclipse I thought I would note what is worth getting.

For a start

Then the rest we can add via the update manager.

In Eclipse choose

Help
> Software Updates
> Find and Install...
> Search for new features to install
> Add Update Site...

In the Update Manager add the Web Tools Project update site http://download.eclipse.org/webtools/updates/ . This once installed adds both BIRT (reporting), Visual Editor and TPTP (testing and profiling) to your update site list.

Add the new Web Tools features to get

Then once installed and restarted go back into the update manager and search for more featues. You can now install BIRT, TPPT and Visual Editor.

The TPPT (see http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-TPTP-Profiling-Tool/tptpProfilingArticle.html
for an tutorial). Allows you to

BIRT is a reporting suite - I keep looking at it as an alternative to Jasper Reports. The report building GUI certainly seems better than anything Jasper Offer.

The Visual Editor is a Swing/SWT GUI builder - nice if you want a thick client application.


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