Sunday 25 January 2015

Java power tools series - Extra plugins to enrich Eclipse IDE

I hope, you have already read "Preface" of my java power tools series.

I love using Eclipse, but it is perturbing to upgrade it. Because every time we need to install numerous extra plugins to enrich its standard ability. Besides this, we need to recollect what all plugins to be installed in new Eclipse version. So I thought to publish a post to list Eclipse plugin names which I rely on regularly or occasionally for my own future reference. I hope below Eclipse plugins listing may benefit other java developers too.

Eclipse Plugins


Free
Commercial
Development
Liferay IDE - for building plugins for the Liferay Portal 
for developing Spring applications & GGTS for developing, debugging and executing Groovy and Grails applications
JBoss Tools - like Hibernate Tools provides tooling for JPA and HQL
Plugin for Groovy - provides Eclipse support for Groovy projects
Scala IDE - provides advanced editing and debugging support for the development of pure Scala and mixed Scala-Java applications
AngularJS - Eclipse plugin for AngularJS projects

Unnecessary Code Detector - Dead code analysis
FindSecurityBugs, LAPSE+ - Code security analysis

Unit testing and Code Coverage
Infinitest - Greatly works with TDD. Each time a change is made on the source code, Infinitest runs all the tests that might fail because of these changes.
MoreUnit - Shortcuts to switch between tests and classes under tests, create test stubs, mock support, decoration, refactoring support
EclEmma Java Code Coverage - a Java code coverage tool for Eclipse

Productivity
InstaSearch - fast text search in the workspace
Eclipse Code Recommenders + Snipmatch - code recommendation and a snippet completion engine
MouseFeed - Helps to form a habit of using keyboard shortcuts
JAutodoc - For automatically adding Javadoc and file headers to your source code
JRebel - Live code reload.  Eliminates need to build your app to see changes
Diagramming and Reverse Engineering
Diver, Jive - Runtime sequence diagrams generation
ObjectAid - Reverse engineering for class diagram generation
ModelGoon- Generate various UML diagrams from code
BundleMaker - Dependency analysis
Maintainj - Runtime sequence and class diagrams generation and debugging
Architexa - Generate layered, class and sequence diagrams from code
Performance Analysis
Java Mission Control - A set of plugins designed to help develop, profile and diagnose applications running on the Oracle Java HotSpot VM
VisualVM - for monitoring and profiling of java applications
Lockness - Java thread dumps analysis
MAT - Java head dump analyzer

Miscellaneous
JD-Eclipse - Java decompiler
EasyShell - Offers tight integration of system file manager (Windows Explorer, Gnome Nautilus, KDE Konqueror, Mac Finder, ...) and shell (cmd.exe, Linux/Mac terminal) in Eclipse
Eclipse-fonts - Increase/decrease font-size in editor
AnyEdit Tools - Convert, compare, sort etc.


Updates History
  • 20/May/2017 - Added Infinitest for unit testing


If you know or have experienced any other outstanding Eclipse plugin, please share the name of the plugin in the comment.

Disclaimer
I am not biased to particular free or commercial tools, rather my objective is about sharing my own experience on set of tools.