Monday, August 13, 2007

Most Useful Top 50+ Eclipse Plug-ins

I have compiled list of Visual Studio add-ons at my previous post. Now it is turn for Eclipse, the world's best ide ;) As you see the looong list, Eclipse has much bigger community that develops and provides plug-ins. All of the plug-ins are free or open source. I also have to mention that version compatibilities are the problem, you should be careful enough to check out the Eclipse versions that following plug-ins support.
  • Checkstyle integrates the well-known source code analyzer that helps you ensure that your Java code adheres to a set of coding standards.
  • Subclipse is an Eclipse Team Provider plug-in providing support for Subversion within the Eclipse IDE.
  • Mylyn is the Task-Focused UI for Eclipse that reduces information overload and makes multi-tasking easy. It does this by making tasks a first class part of Eclipse, and integrating rich and offline editing for repositories such as Bugzilla, Trac, and JIRA.
  • Copy Fully Qualified Class Name Just a great small feature, right click the file and get the full name with package listings.
  • EclipseUtils Plugins Stores where in the file your last where. Why is this not already built-in I don't know.
  • Colorer take5 is a syntax highlighting and text parsing library, that provides services of text parsing in host editor systems in real-time and transforming results into colored text. Result information allows to search and build outlined lists of functions, structures, and to search and indent programming language constructions (brackets, paired tags).
  • eUML2 Studio is a powerful set of tools developped from scratch for Eclipse. These tools are designed specially for developpers to put UML in action at the development level: ensure the software quality and reduce the development time.
  • JavaScript Plug-in by Harish Kataria
  • Implementors plugins add the possibility to jump to the implementation of an interface. Alternatively, you can jump to the interface of an implementation.
  • Gotofile plugin let you enter partial filenames in a "quicksearch" box and open the file directly
  • UMLet is an open-source UML tool with a simple user interface: draw UML diagrams fast, export diagrams to eps, pdf, jpg, svg, and clipboard, share diagrams using Eclipse, and create new, custom UML elements.
  • Metrics calculates various metrics for your code during build cycles and warns you, via the Problems view, of 'range violations' for each metric. This allows you to stay continuously aware of the health of your code base.
  • Violet UML Editor is a powerfull modeling software, easy to use, ready to work by Cay Horstmann. It draws nice-looking class, sequence, state, object and use-case diagrams.
  • FindBugs - a program which uses static analysis to look for bugs in Java code.
  • Flow4J is an Eclipse Plug-in for modeling process flows in a drag and drop manner. A process flow can contain process steps which can be linked together to a complex flow.
  • Doclipse helps you write Java source files with Javadoc tags, either for documentation purposes or to be processed by a tool such as EJBGen or XDoclet. New tags can be added to the plug-in by writing XML files defining the new tags and their attributes.
  • Spring IDE is a graphical user interface for the configuration files used by the Spring Framework.


  • The PDT project is working towards providing a PHP Development Tools framework for the Eclipse platform. This project will encompass all development components necessary to develop PHP and will facilitate extensibility.
  • QuickREx gives you a view in which you can enter test-texts and try regular expressions. The expressions are evaluated against the test-text on the fly, matches are highlighted and you can navigate between the matches. You can also navigate through groups within each match.
  • JadClipse is a plug-in that seamlessly integrates Jad (the fast Java decompiler) with Eclipse
  • PMD scans Java source code and looks for potential problems like possible bugs, dead code, suboptimal code, overcomplicated expressions and duplicate code.
  • PHPEclipse - plug-in for PHP Development. It takes advantage of a robust and widely used application framework
  • TestNG is a testing framework inspired from JUnit and NUnit but introducing some new functionalities that make it more powerful and easier to use.
  • Eclipse SQL Explorer is a thin SQL client that allows you to query and browse any JDBC compliant database. It supports plugins with specialized functionality for individual databases (Oracle, DB2 and MySQL) and can be extended to include specialized support for other databases.
  • CFEclipse project is to create a plugin for the Eclipse platform that provides a professional quality IDE for CFML developers.
  • JyDT aims to provide the development tools expected by a Jython developer. The project was started by Red Robin in November 2003 and is carried out with limited resources.
  • EPIC is an open source Perl IDE based on the Eclipse platform. Features supported are syntax highlighting, on-the-fly syntax check, content assist, perldoc support, source formatter, templating support and a Perl debugger.
  • Jalopy is a source code formatter/beautifier/pretty printer for the Java programming language. It is aimed to provide a full-featured, yet free alternative to the well-known Jindent. Plug-ins for Ant, Eclipse, IDEA, JBuilder, JDeveloper, jEdit, NetBeans.
  • Mevenide aims to integrate Maven into standard IDEs. Right now Mevenide provides support for Eclipse, NetBeans, JBuilderand IntelliJ IDEA.
  • Veloeclipse is a HTML/Velocity Editor for Eclipse, it is based on veloedit for velocity parsing and outline but adds all the html features you would d expect to find in a html editor.
  • Log4E helps you to use your logger easily in Java Projects. The Plugin Log4E is not bound to any special logging framework. Thus you might be able to adapt to your own logger by defining your own templates using the preferences. It has active support for Log4j, Commons Logging and JDK 1.4 logging.
  • Eclipseutilplugins - Set of small plug-ins to Eclipse for simplification of a life to programmers.
  • Continuous testing uses excess cycles on a developer's workstation to continuously run regression tests in the background, providing rapid feedback about test failures as source code is edited. It reduces the time and energy required to keep code well-tested, and prevents regression errors from persisting uncaught for long periods of time.
  • Ldap Tools delivers tools for working with LDAP from within Eclipse.
  • The RMI Plug-in for Eclipse is the most comprehensive solution for developing Java RMI systems using the Eclipse platform.
  • Image Export Plug In allows exporting GEF diagrams to “images” in several formats in a generic and extensible way.
  • green is a LIVE round-tripping editor, meaning that it supports both software engineering and reverse engineering. You can use green to create a UML class diagram from code, or to generate code by drawing a class diagram.
  • EPF aims at producing a customizable software process engineering framework, with exemplary process content and tools, supporting a broad variety of project types and development styles.
  • VSS Plugin for Eclipse - integrated in the IDE environment and provides support for all daily VSS operations.
  • SSH Console is a plugin which permits you to connect to an SSH Server and use it like a local shell.
  • FacesIDE is an Eclipse plugin for web application development that used JSF It requires Eclipse 3.0 (or higher), JDT, GEF and EclipseHTMLEditor.
  • LogWatcher adds a view to Eclipse that allows log files to be monitored for changes, similar to the Unix tail utility.
  • Lomboz is an eclipse plug-in for J2EE developers by extending eclipse JDT. It employs some of the proven open-source technologies. Supporting the complete development cycle: Code, deploy, test and debug.
  • ServerEclipse is a set of plugins that provides a basic web-application development environment Eclipse 3.0. ServerEclipse provides IDE utilties (editors, code highlighting, etc) for JSP, XML, HTML, CSS and *.properties files.
  • ResourceBundle Editor - for edit localized properties files. It allows you to manage key/value information for all related properties files at once, through the same screen
  • RSS View is a news reader for RSS and Atom feeds designed to integrate into the Eclipse workspace.
  • FreeMem is a graphical memory monitor that keeps track of the memory used by Eclipse's virtual machine.
  • Eclipse profiler - plugin for profiling Java applications inside of Eclipse. NOTE! Project is dead and does not work on new versions of Eclipse.
  • Hibernate Synchronizer is a free plugin code generation tool to be used with the Hibernate persistence framework.
  • HTML Tidy enables you to format and check (X)HTML or XML code.
  • Jlint will check your Java code and find bugs, inconsistencies and synchronization problems by doing data flow analysis and building the lock graph.
  • JSEditor provides basic JavaScript editing functions such as syntax hi-lighting and content outlining.
Resources, Links and Plug-in Directories
See Also;

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why didn't you just put a link to where you copied this from?

If you didn't just copied it, why does it include plugins that judging from the description duplicate standard behaviour (eg. pretty printer for java) or duplicate other plugin (e.g. the various UML tools) without any hint at what makes them different or usefull.

So a much too long list with not enough information contained.

bayarsaikhan said...

Dear Anon;

There is a link already at the end of the post, but that links contains hundreds of plugins for Eclipse.

These are the most used, or most popular ones that people uses.

Unknown said...

One of the most truly useful plugins I've found is the Jar Class Finder from IBM Alphaworks. Just point at a directory, type in a class name and it searches all the jars,zip files,etc. It's really helpful for resolving ClassDefNotFound exceptions.

Andrew said...

You might consider adding Aptana to your list of plugins. Yes it can run as a standalone version of eclipse, but you can also install it as a plugin to an existing eclipse instance. It's extremely useful for web developers

Anonymous said...

Nice list - two of my plugins are listed ;)

The third one is little newer: ExploreFS is a tiny plugin to open any resource in the file system, e.g. Windows explorer. http://www.junginger.biz/eclipse/

Anonymous said...

Great!.
Thanx for the informative post !.

Can you recommend any other resources like HTML Tidy ???.

Anonymous said...

Top 10 of the eclipse plugins

http://www.shankh.com/top-10-eclipse-plugins/

Quite handy

Anonymous said...

Didn't show the link properly in previous comment,so posting it again. Top 10 of the eclipse plugins

http://www.shankh.com/top-10-eclipse-plugins/

Quite handy

Anonymous said...

I have just installed Green UML editor and my first impression is that for a free tool it is well-integrated with Eclipse and has very reasonable functionality. It is just class diagram, but supports round trip engineering. There are a few rough edges, but they can be easily worked around and the program seems quite stable. Instructions for installing via the Eclipse interface can be found here: http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=131110&group_id=132685

Anonymous said...

You are missing one plugin called HTTP4E. It is an awesome tool for REST HTTP calls, it has tabs, syntax coloring, auto suggest.

Long story short if you want to run REST, SOAP, HTTP calls, tamper HTTP this is the tol for you. (Actually it is the only RESTful tool for Eclipse)

http://http4e.roussev.org/

Unknown said...

Thanks....I found your plugins article

Online Sweepstakes