Fernando Lozano's Blog

What happened to all my Eclipse plug-ins?

I must admit I'm having trouble figuring out the inner workings of the Eclipse ecosystem. Almost all main tool vendors participate in the project and you can find hundreds (if not thousands) open source plug-ins. In spite of that, Eclipse remains a difficult environment to start with, and it's not easy to identify a successful set of “must-have” open source plug-ins.

During the early days of Eclipse 2.0 I created my work environment around a set of small open source plug-ins: SolarEclipse, X-Men, JFaceDBC, AstonWizzards, Webapp and GenerateEqualsAndHashcode. With those, I had basic HTML and XML editing capabilities, easy debugging of servlets (but lacked debugging JSPs), the ability of testing SQL statements against my database, and templates to create Web app projects, action classes, the like.

But all of them became unmaintained (maybe with the exception of AstonWizzards). SolarEclipse, with would arguably be the most useful of those, had two child projects (that quickly became unmaintained also) and was incorporated alongside X-Men to the JBoss-IDE, which now uses WTP for equivalent functionality.

I didn't liked more powerful plug-in sets like MyEclipse and Lomboz. Not because I am biased towards open source software, but because those plug-ins imposed a too restrictive project and coding structure. They were not easy to integrate to existing projects and limited developers to the plug-in way of doing things. What if I don't want to use XDoclet? What if I don't want that use of the business delegate design pattern?

Eclipse WTP itself was the reason many of the plug-ins I was used to stopped evolving. And WTP took two years or more to provide the replacement functionality. Hint to people asking why Netbeans looks to have gained momentum during the latest year: developers need easy access to basic features, that Netbeans provided that with 4.0, 4.1 and 5.0, while Eclipse remained the basic edit-debug-refactor IDE.

I have yet to try WTP to see how it fits my working environment. It looks too big and complicated to start with, but I know from following the project mailing lists they had a design goal of flexibility and were actively pursuing it. My main complain is that they took too long to provide something usable.

Take VE as another example. It also killed incipient open source plug-ins dedicated to visual development, but it is not usable yet, besides being older than WTP, and a smaller project. The current release is too heavy and crashes a lot. While I understand the Eclipse goals are not just provide Java development tools, but infrastructure for any language, any platform and any library development tools, it's a shame we still don't have a good quality open source visual editor for Eclipse, be it for Swing or SWT.

Maybe the Eclipse Foundation should rethink its goals and practices, to give Eclipse users simpler ready-to-use tools in shorter time frames, instead of letting this task solely for tool vendors, which still tend to provide mostly proprietary tools. Maybe the Foundation should look at ways to better work alongside the community of small and open source plug-in developers, say providing them hosting infrastructure a la SourceForge and java.net, or a catalog of third-party plug-ins, or simply be more active seeking their support and participation in extending the Eclipse platform. But maybe five years from now there will be only Eclipse and I'll realize how wrong I am now.

I see at BIRT as an example of what looks to me as weak interaction between Eclipse and the general open source community: while there are many open source powerful and mature reporting engines like JasperReports and JFreeReport, besides the charting engine JFreeChart, they created their reporting engine from scratch. Whatever the quality of the initial contributions to the BIRT project (I must concede they were quickier to provide results than VE and WTP) this sends out the message the Eclipse Foundation is not open to outside work.

After those rants, I'd like to know: what is your personal must-have set of Eclipse plug-ins?

Today I switched from Webapp to Sysdeo (and JBoss-IDE when I want EJB debugging), I hack X-Men to run with newer Eclipse releases, have my own set of AstonWizzards templates and add a couple more code-generation tools, besides PMD to remind me when I should be ashamed of my own code. I still do not have a preferred HTML / JSP editor, and sometimes use JBoss-IDE just for that.

Comments

• Fernando,This is probably not what you are looking for, but I suggest seeking out something like MyEclipse, particularly if you are adopting Eclipse for an organization.One of the many hats that I wear involves oversight of the tools that our developers can use... our legal department is paranoid to say the least, and I have to submit all of the licenses for review before we can adopt a plugin. MyEclipse has a pre-screaning policy that satisfies legal, and they do a good job of picking plugins that play together well.This is not an ideal solution, but something to consider.
  --JohnR

  Posted by: johnreynolds on February 10, 2006 at 07:08 AM

• Hi johnreynolds, I evaluated MyEclipse a few times and its very popular among my customers, but sometimes it's "too much" and sometimes it's not flexible enough. I think it should have improved a lot thanks to their participation in the WTP project. but I also have costumers that mandate the use of open source tools and then MyEclipse is not an option.

  But I asked for people's favourites among open source Eclipse plug-ins. What would be yours?

  Posted by: flozano on February 10, 2006 at 07:22 AM

• I personnally stopped using Eclipse plugins a few months ago exactly for the reasons you present here. I was mostly tired of incompatibilities every time I updated Eclipse itself and trying a new plugin was always dreaded since many times they just didn't work (even with the right version of Eclipse) and oh what a pain to remove them. I am also sick of the size and complexity of some plugins: have you seen the size in memory and on the disk of Eclipse + WTP?
  So no favorite here :(

  Posted by: gfx on February 10, 2006 at 09:38 AM

• Hi gfx, I agree we need some kind of "Eclipse light" that is no so huge but yet has features beyond the basic JDT. JBoss-IDE was a close attempt before they moved to WTP.

  As for removing plug-ins, check the docs about branding and links in Eclipse Workbench. It's easy to have separate directories for each plug-in set, so you don't risk erasing the wrong plug-ins, even when they do not interact well with the Update Manager.

  Posted by: flozano on February 10, 2006 at 11:14 AM

• actually WTP is looking good. I've personally tried MyEclipse and found it a bit too heavy, especially the JSP editor. It would recompile and check all my JSPs on each build. WTP is a lighter version tho not as feature-rich as MyEclipse.

  Posted by: bookofjamesdotcom on February 12, 2006 at 10:26 PM

• MyEclipse (like many plugins I tried) are far too much centered around a few frameworks and products I don't use for them to be useful to me. For example if you don't create a Struts application running on JBoss using mySQL as a database many of them (including MyEclipse in the version I tried) pretty much stop doing anything for you except throwing up error messages.
  It's indeed also very heavy.

  I've now stopped using Eclipse and moved completely (back) to JBuilder (for as long as it lasts, guess it won't work once I find an employer using Mustang in a few years).

  Posted by: jwenting on February 13, 2006 at 06:00 AM

• My experience is also just to avoid (almost) all Eclipse plugins. Eclipse is great for Java (and better than other free tools I've used), but it's not very good at anything else.

  Posted by: tjpalmer on February 13, 2006 at 08:27 AM

• This sums up well everything that's so wrong with it.

  
  http://www.beyondcode.org/articles/eclipse-plugins.html

  Let me add plugins *never* install correctly. I hate them.
  They promise alot but dont deliver. Here's my tool list.
  HTML/JSP/PHP - Homesite
  (Dreamweaver if I feel lazy)
  Pure Java - Eclipse
  Visual Swing - NetBeans (and it's glorious!)

  Maybe after they fix the plugin system people will pickup the pace. Until then though, the plugin community seems pretty dead to me.

  
  

  Posted by: ilazarte on February 13, 2006 at 11:47 AM

• Hi jwenting, that's one problem I don't like with most "rich" plug-ins, they impose on you a certain way to work and to code. Most lack flexbility do adapt do your own practices. I'd like to know if someone actually found WTP better in this respect. I prefer a plug-ing that does just the basics (JSP editing and debuggind and auto-complete for deployment descritors) because those I can use whatever the project. When they start needing Xdoclet, or a particular class library, the usefulness srinks to just projects or teams that happen to use / know those tools.

  Posted by: flozano on February 14, 2006 at 05:06 AM

• Hi tjpalmer, and which plug-ins you don't avoid?

  Posted by: flozano on February 14, 2006 at 05:08 AM

• Hi ilazarte, I really liked your article. I hope someone from the Eclipse Foundation PMCs read it..

  Some of the problems you cited have good solutions using standard Eclipse infrastructure, I'll write about them in a future blog, and maybe this helps plug-in writers (and Eclipse users) better manage their environment.

  But your article also left me with an stronger feeling the Eclipse ecosystem is not healthy. The Eclipse Foundation should actively pursue ways to better interact with the outside community and foster independent plug-ins. It looks like the are the formal Eclipse projects, that are good quality in general, but too bureucratic and too slow to providing results, and everything else is simply left out.

  Posted by: flozano on February 14, 2006 at 05:15 AM

• Hey,

  I may be biased, okay I work for Oracle on the product I am about to recommend, but have you tried the latest release of JDeveloper? It does provide the integrated developement experience you are asking for and it will quite happily created pure J2EE apps with a whole bunch of visual and nonvisual design tools.

  http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/jdev/index.html

  All of this is in one integrated and tested package, and of course if it now free as in Beer now. The only charges come when you deploy certain Oracle technologies; but these are well signposted and easy to avoid if required by your situation.

  Gerard

  Posted by: gdavison on February 14, 2006 at 05:39 AM

• Hi gdavison, I agree JDevelop is a great product, but I have for it some of the same critics as I have for Eclipse-based products like MyEclipse (too heavy and forces me to work the way their way).

  And the reason of this blog is not to discuss the best Java IDE, but to figure out what's wrong with the Eclipse community and what are the dependable open source plug-ins for Eclipse users.

  Or has JDeveloper became Eclipse-based and open source? ;-)

  Posted by: flozano on February 14, 2006 at 05:50 AM

• Fair doos, I didn't want to start any sort of battle. :-)

  G.

  PS And no it isn't open sourced or based on Eclipse.....

  Posted by: gdavison on February 14, 2006 at 08:27 AM

• what i have :
  - anyedit tools
  - goto file
  - net.sf.colorer
  - keepresident
  - xmleditor
  - jsp format

  so, as you can see, i also think that all "plugin collections" like myEclipse or Lomboz are too heavy.

  peace,
  edi.

  Posted by: applebanana8 on February 14, 2006 at 08:45 AM

• Sorry, I didn't write that article! I just found that link after looking for like-minded users one frustrating evening.

  Posted by: ilazarte on February 15, 2006 at 11:17 PM

• Fernando, it may not be of much help, and I feel the pain (I am also a culprit because I have some plugins that are still not ported to eclipse 3.0 :-) ) but check what we are trying to do with easyeclipse. Do you think you could help? Like the custom astonwizards you made could be very helpful to others.
  -- Philippe

  Posted by: pombredanne on May 18, 2006 at 08:11 PM

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