Eclipse Ide

I have never really thought about using IDE's for doing any kind of serious dev work. Although they have generally been good for autogenerating code and making it look like you can get done a lot in very little time, they generally end up being more hassle when you have to maintain the code that is generated. Which is why I generally stayed with a decent editor ( vim) until … … I came across the open source Eclipse IDE project started by IBM. I have just one word to describe it - wow! It pretty much blew away all my expectations and still keeps doing it with each release. Now all I need is vim support within it and I am in nirvana.

latest news: http://www.eclipsepowered.org

Here are some of the plug-ins which I regularly use in my development work:

J2EE

1. My Eclipse http://www.myeclipseide.com - costs a very reasonable $29/- per year. Support for all the J2EE stuff. Works with pretty much all app servers out there.
2. lomboz http://www.objectlearn.com/index.jsp - open source and does a pretty decent job. I had problems getting it to work with Jetty though. It did not support Jetty out of the box so I tried to define a custom configuration for it but I gave up after a while. Worked fine with Tomcat and JBoss. It had soap support which My Eclipse does not.

JDBC/SQL

1. JFaceDBC http://jfacedbc.sourceforge.net/ - pretty decent. Pretty much has everything except for the complete Access experience.
2. DbEdit http://sourceforge.net/projects/dbedit - the Access experience.
3. QuantumDB http://quantum.sourceforge.net/ - looks slick but the sql editor leaves much to be desired.

GUI

1. Visual Eclipse Project http://www.eclipse.org/vep/ - currently pre 1.0 but if the current functionality is any indication of what it will do, Java development on the client will be on par with VB. It does round-trip gui editing in realtime. This means that if you change the source code file, the gui is updated in front of you. There are no hidden hooks embedded inside the code. The code is somewhat strucured in the sense that there are known methods which contain initialization code and it follows some patterns.
2. Jigloo http://cloudgarden.com/jigloo/ - another very good gui tool. This one supports switching between the SWT and Swing UI's with the click of a button ( as best as possible).

UML

1. Omondo http://www.omondo.com - pretty extensive tool. It will generate diagrams for you from existing code ( which is how I typically use it) or generate code from diagrams for you ( ech! try maintaining it).

J/Python

1. a link to a good overview of various plug-ins http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/moinmoin/EclipsePythonIntegration
2. my favorite: Red Robin http://home.tiscali.be/redrobin/jython/index.html

Misc

1. syntax coloring
2. Log watcher aka tail
3. JTetris!
4. toString() generator
5. eclipse2ant - generates ant build files for a project easily.