What is the single best free Eclipse plugin for a Java developer

Question

Some Eclipse plugins are mandated by your environment. The appropriate source code management plugin, for example - and I'm not interested in those.

Some provide useful enhancements, but in a specific niche. I'm not interested in those.

Some are great, but cost money. I'm not interested in those.

Some were really useful on older versions of Eclipse, but are now part of the core build of the latest Eclipse version (3.4 as I write this). I'm not interested in those.

I want advice on which plugins every Java SE developer should be installing, one per answer please.

I don't understand why this was closed as I found some very useful plugins from the answers? As a developer it seems very constructive, but maybe needed to be reworded for better detail? — James Drinkard, Oct 27 '11 at 14:32
Although they were accepted in the early days of StackOverflow, these polls or opinion-solociting questions are now considered to dilute the value of this site, which is mainly in giving clear answers to specific programming problems. There are other StackExchange sites where this question might now be more appropriate. — Bill Michell, Oct 27 '11 at 17:58

score 74 · Accepted Answer · edited Oct 05 '11 at 11:57

74

Findbugs saved me doing something silly twice today.

http://findbugs.sourceforge.net/

Eclipse update site is: http://findbugs.cs.umd.edu/eclipse/

edited Oct 05 '11 at 11:57

Bohemian

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answered Sep 17 '08 at 16:02

izb

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score 21 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 17 '08 at 16:05

21

Answering my own question with my current favourite, Jadclipse, which works with jad to disassemble class files from third party libraries.

http://jadclipse.sourceforge.net/

answered Sep 17 '08 at 16:05

Bill Michell

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jad is not good with classfiles from Java 5 and newer. The latest version of jadclipse allows using e.g. JODE which does a better job. Unfortunately jad is not open source. – Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen Oct 11 '09 at 13:13

score 17 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 19 '08 at 14:21

17

If you need to get more insight in your code coverage EclEmma is pretty straightforward and useful

http://www.eclemma.org

answered Nov 19 '08 at 14:21

Johan Pelgrim

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score 14 · Answer 4 · answered Sep 17 '08 at 16:04

14

Subclipse SVN for eclipse Update URL: http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.4.x

answered Sep 17 '08 at 16:04

Paul Whelan

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Except I explicitly stated I wasn't interested in SCM plugins, since that is pretty much mandated by the environment. I'm looking for plugins I have a choice about. – Bill Michell Sep 17 '08 at 16:07

score 13 · Answer 5 · answered Dec 10 '10 at 16:46

13

MouseFeed Eclipse Plugin

I am using this one, which is very helpful for programmers who don't use key shortcut because they don't know about them.

MouseFeed helps to form a habit of using keyboard shortcuts. When the user clicks on a button or on a menu item, the plugin shows a popup reminding about the key shortcut.

answered Dec 10 '10 at 16:46

kajo

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Does anyone know by any chance if there is a similar plugin for Microsoft Visual Studio? – Jul 08 '14 at 10:26

score 9 · Answer 6 · answered Sep 17 '08 at 21:13

9

Checkstyle. Its very quick.

FindBugs is wonderful but quite slow

answered Sep 17 '08 at 21:13

Fortyrunner

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score 8 · Answer 7 · edited Jul 02 '19 at 07:05

8

Resource Bundle Plugin

edited Jul 02 '19 at 07:05

Glorfindel

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answered Mar 17 '10 at 17:58

bora.oren

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It messes up your file at first, but when you learn the right way to deal with it, everything works great. My team just loved it. – Mario Marinato Jan 31 '11 at 14:01
i love it too :) thanx for developers to develop this such good tool – bora.oren Feb 02 '11 at 14:13

score 8 · Answer 8 · answered Sep 17 '08 at 16:35

My answer to this is clearly eclim. It exports Eclipse functionality to Vim, enabling me to use several awesome features of Eclipse, like auto-completion, autobuild and error-markup in the source file (using locations in Vim), auto-formatting, automatic imports, JavaDoc search, Source code Search... blah, I could go on forever. The most important thing is: I don't have to use the suck that is the Eclipse Java Editor (to me, editor quality is always subjective, of course).

Check out the site if you're into Vim, but forced/tempted to use Eclipse for one reason or another.

score 7 · Answer 9 · answered Mar 29 '11 at 18:40

7

Google just recently released CodePro, great plugin.

answered Mar 29 '11 at 18:40

Berlin Brown

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score 7 · Answer 10 · answered Sep 17 '08 at 21:45

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I'm particularly fond of the bytecode outliner plugin, although it won't suit all tastes since looking at Java bytecode isn't for everyone. Sometimes it's really useful to see the underlying bytecode for your Java class.

Update site: http://download.forge.objectweb.org/eclipse-update/

Description: http://asm.objectweb.org/eclipse/index.html

answered Sep 17 '08 at 21:45

mpresley

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+1: That is so cool...I will have to check it out. Have been feeling the urge to get closer to the byte code and this is a great way to do it! – Stu Thompson Sep 18 '08 at 17:20

score 6 · Answer 11 · answered Jul 05 '11 at 19:20

JAutodoc is extremely helpful if you are required to proved javadoc in your source and need to add it to a large class or many classes at the same time. It uses the name of your variables to create the javadoc, so it is not perfect and is limited by how meaningful your parameter names are. Even if you have to go back and fix it up a bit, it saves you a lot of time.

http://jautodoc.sourceforge.net/update/

score 6 · Answer 12 · answered Sep 17 '08 at 16:29

6

The Eclipse TPTP can be incredibly useful for finding the slow spots in code and for anything else that would requiring debugging, profiling, or benchmarking. The only flaw is that it doesn't work on the mac :'(.

answered Sep 17 '08 at 16:29

Paul Wicks

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jvisualvm runs with the latest update of Java on 10.5. I am not certain if jvisualvm was backported to Java 5 or is Java 6 only on the Mac. – Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen Oct 17 '09 at 14:10

score 6 · Answer 13 · answered Sep 17 '08 at 17:52

6

I do really like the Andrei Loskutov's plugins:

http://andrei.gmxhome.de/eclipse.html

answered Sep 17 '08 at 17:52

score 5 · Answer 14 · answered Sep 17 '08 at 16:03

5

spring IDE

Update URL: http://springide.org/updatesite

answered Sep 17 '08 at 16:03

Paul Whelan

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Isn't that only useful if I'm using Spring? – Bill Michell Sep 17 '08 at 16:07

score 4 · Answer 15 · answered Feb 09 '11 at 05:00

I found sourceHelper plugin very useful when developing and debugging code.

The description of the plugin on the website says, "The “Source Helper” plugin is an Eclipse plugin that takes a very useful feature that exists in Intellij IDEA and puts it into Eclipse. In short, the feature shows the code of an out-of-visible-range starting bracket by floating a window that shows the code you cannot see. This helps immensely when trying to identify what closing bracket belongs to what part of the code."

score 4 · Answer 16 · answered Jul 23 '11 at 08:12

4

Chronon the time travelling debugger is awesome. I hope to see this ported to other languages in the future.

http://www.chrononsystems.com/

answered Jul 23 '11 at 08:12

davorb

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Hmm. Pushing the definitions of "free" here; the plug-in may be free, but it looks like the runtime component that it requires to do its job is paid after the evaluation period. – Bill Michell Jul 25 '11 at 09:19

score 4 · Answer 17 · answered Sep 17 '08 at 16:20

If you use Hibernate then Hibernate Tools is a must. I really like the ability to write my HQL or JPQL and view the generated SQL real time!

If you're not using Hibernate I'm guessing your using a database in some form or another. Therefore, I would recommend the Data Tools Platform. In fact, you would be crazy to develop Java apps without using all the plugins provided by the Eclipse Ganymede Release. It's a great development platform without the headache of getting all the must have plugins synced up and working together.

score 3 · Answer 18 · answered Oct 22 '09 at 17:47

3

I couple of my favorites are Mylyn and CheckStyle

answered Oct 22 '09 at 17:47

Ascalonian

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score 3 · Answer 19 · answered Aug 06 '10 at 16:31

3

EditBox

http://editbox.sourceforge.net/

answered Aug 06 '10 at 16:31

helpermethod

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billjamesdev · Answer 20 · 2008-09-26T05:10:03.630

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Seems like you can't really answer this question without having a focus for your development in Eclipse. I guess everyone needs a build and dependency system, so maybe Maven tools will win?

http://m2eclipse.codehaus.org/ <-- nice for managing your projects pom.xml
http://code.google.com/p/q4e/ <--- nice for managing your Maven repositories from Eclipse

edited Sep 26 '08 at 05:10

answered Sep 17 '08 at 17:11

billjamesdev

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Findbugs is already mentioned elsewhere. This is a poll. Can you delete findbugs from your answer and update the other findbugs reply, please? – Bill Michell Sep 17 '08 at 18:23

Stu Thompson · Answer 21 · 2008-09-17T19:06:55.700

Eclipse Metrics Feature (update site). The blurb:

This Eclipse plugin 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. You may also export the metrics to HTML for public display or to CSV format for further analysis.

Recalculation of metrics during every build
Export of metrics to CSV or HTML
Visual ‘dashboard’ with HTML export
Supported metrics are:
- McCabe’s Cyclomatic Complexity
- Efferent Couplings
- Lack of Cohesion in Methods
  - Lines Of Code in Method
  - Number Of Fields
  - Number Of Levels
  - Number Of Parameters
  - Number Of Statements
  - Weighted Methods Per Class

(actually, I love FindBugs more, but this project is second.)

score 2 · Answer 22 · answered Aug 13 '09 at 12:25

2

HyperAssist.

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=159157

In my view, it's the single factor that puts Eclipse ahead of every other IDE in terms of actual productivity.

answered Aug 13 '09 at 12:25

rwallace

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score 2 · Answer 23 · answered Oct 11 '09 at 11:07

FileSync has turned out to be really convenient when working with web applications, because it allows me to smoothly get incremental deployment on resource-type files, such as javascripts, JSPs, CSS files, and so on. It's simple to configure and just powerful enough to get the job done.

score 2 · Answer 24 · answered Dec 08 '09 at 17:00

2

JBoss Tools for quick and easy web application development.

answered Dec 08 '09 at 17:00

Maksim Areshkau

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score 2 · Answer 25 · answered Apr 06 '10 at 12:44

2

I'd recommed Spring Source Tool Suite which is for enterprise Java development with Spring framework.

answered Apr 06 '10 at 12:44

rpr

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score 1 · Answer 26 · answered Oct 22 '08 at 01:34

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I'm going to cheat and say the maven plugin. Then everything else can hang off that.

Plus, maven-eclipse-plugin takes care of the biggest single problem I have with eclipse: Setting your classpath.

answered Oct 22 '08 at 01:34

tunaranch

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score 1 · Answer 27 · answered Oct 22 '08 at 08:52

1

I've just discovered Byecycle. This dependency viewer lets you see how pretty (or otherwise) your design is, and highlights any circular dependencies between classes, allowing you to take appropriate action.

answered Oct 22 '08 at 08:52

Bill Michell

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score 1 · Answer 28 · answered Nov 19 '08 at 14:30

There's some great stuff mentioned by others, but I'm going to put SQLExplorer out there, too. Maybe not as generally useful as Maven or FindBugs, but it's great for pulling any JDBC data source into the IDE so you can test it and explore the DB structure. It's also available as a standalone RCP app.

score 1 · Answer 29 · answered Nov 19 '08 at 14:33

1

Visual Editor for quick GUI development.

answered Nov 19 '08 at 14:33

supermedo

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score 1 · Answer 30 · answered May 26 '09 at 11:52

1

java.decompiler.free.fr/?q=jdeclipse Java Decomipler Plugin for eclipse. I thought, it is the most useful plugin.

answered May 26 '09 at 11:52

Shashi

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score 0 · Answer 31 · edited Nov 24 '09 at 08:00

0

Fast Code eclipse plugin can be of help a little.

edited Nov 24 '09 at 08:00

Craig McQueen

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answered Oct 11 '09 at 10:57

fastcodejava

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What is the single best free Eclipse plugin for a Java developer

31 Answers31