25 Feb, 2006
Eclipse and its plugins
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
- Get Eclipse 3.1.2 as a download from www.eclipse.org
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
- A nice XML editor
- A XML Schema view a bit like XML Spy's or OxygenXml's
- Web server start/stop plugins
- Database editor/viewer
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
- Profile Code
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.