Interesting Eclipse Plug-ins

There are many plug-ins for Eclipse available: just have a look at the Eclipse Plugin Central site. When switching PC's (at work) or installing a new version of Eclipse it's always useful to get a fast overview of what you really use and/or need. I know: Eclipse has neat features to tell you that... if you have the time and the opportunity to consult them.

I prefer to list them here, because having that list on the Internet beats remembering to bring the latest printout!

General Plug-ins

  • All The News is an RSS reader. ATN uses three Views to show your site list, the headlines from the chosen site, and a browser view with the chosen news item. Simple, but it works well enough. I haven't checked that it works through a proxy - yet ;-)

Development Plug-ins

  • CFEclipse is not Dreamweaver, but it's unbeatable if you work with Coldfusion and all your other tools are integrated in Eclipse.
  • Eclipse SQL Explorer "is a thin SQL client that allows you to query and browse any JDBC compliant database". That's a simple mission statement, but not so simple a mission, and yet it is well executed here.
  • FileSync can be quite handy - if you can use the latest versions in Eclipse 3.1 or higher. The older 0.9.2 release does not work with 100% reliability in our Eclipse 3.0 environment with automatic builds in CFEclipse.
  • Mylyn is a strange beast, until you get used to it. What does it do? "Mylyn is the Task-Focused UI for Eclipse that reduces information overload [...] by making tasks a first class part of Eclipse, and integrating rich and offline editing for repositories such as Bugzilla, Trac, and JIRA". It's easier to use than to explain; the way I use it helps me focus on a few files, related to a specific task or project, rather than having to scroll or search to all the projects in my workspace - for that, Mylyn is very helpful. Until the beginning of 2007, Mylyn was called Mylar.

The Fall 2006 issue of Eclipse Review magazine has an article titled "27 Must-Have Eclipse Plug-Ins: Get Them Now".