There are 1,667 plug-ins and solutions available in the Eclipse marketplace! By the time you read this, there may be more. If you venture outside the official market, you’ll find hundreds of other plug-ins developed to be compatible with your Eclipse IDE. There are so many plug-ins to choose from. Most of the plugins available you will never need or hear of. Some may already be installed on the new machine as part of the default IDE installation process. However, it’s safe to say that there are gems to be found as you move toward faster, more efficient, and bug-free code.
In this article, we’ve collected 14 of the most useful and helpful plug-ins you can add to the Eclipse IDE. These plug-ins are aimed at Java developers and include tools for writing, testing, analyzing, and optimizing code and workflows.
1. Spotbugs
Spotbugs, the spiritual successor to FindBugs, is an open source solution that uses static analysis to search for bugs in Java code. This community-maintained plug-in checks for over 400 different bug patterns in code, including null pointer dereference, infinite recursive loops, incorrect use of Java libraries, and deadlocks.
2. Codota
Codota is an intelligent auto-complete service that helps developers write code smarter and faster. Codota uses AI to combine millions of open source Java programs with your own code context and submit code suggestions as you type.
3. CheckStyle
The CheckStyle plugin is a code validation tool that ensures that your code meets certain coding standards. It does this by examining the Java source code and pointing out the coding rules.
4. SonarLint
SonarLint is designed to act like a spell checker for code, helping verify code quality by dynamically highlighting defects in code as it is written. In addition to Java, it supports JavaScript, PHP, and Python.
5. Project Lombok
This open source project provides plug-ins for most popular ides, Includes Eclipse and its branches (MyEclipse, Red Hat JBoss Developer Studio, JBoss Developer Studio (JBDS), and Spring Tools Suite). Project Lombok is a Java library that saves time writing getters and methods, supports automatic logging of variables, and so on.
6. Maven
Apache Maven is a software project management and understanding tool based on project Object Model (POM) concepts. The plug-in helps manage the build, reporting, and documentation of any Java-based project.
7. Gradle
As a relatively new build management tool, Gradle has quickly become one of the most popular tools and is considered one of the top open source projects in the world. It provides support for Java, c++, Python, and more, and is the choice of millions of developers when managing and automating software delivery.
8.CodeMix 3
If you want to develop Web applications and interfaces, you should probably look at CodeMix. In a way, it brings a lot of VS Code features to Eclipse(and its offshoots), allowing you to develop in Eclipse’s React, Vue, Angular, and other frameworks. Subscriptions provide additional services, such as e-learning courses that can be used directly within the IDE.
9.Jacoco
An open source code coverage tool that generates reports detailing how much code is covered by unit tests. Jacoco allows you to create comprehensive test suites and export the results to HTML, XML, or text files. Jacoco is a must-have tool for comprehensive testing and is compatible with both Gradle and Maven.
10.Quick JUnit
JUnit is a popular open source unit testing framework for Java development that has gained widespread adoption. JUnit itself comes preinstalled in Eclipse, and the Quick JUnit plug-in makes it faster and easier to use with comfortable shortcuts.
11.TestNG for Eclipse
Inspired by JUnit, TestNG aims to provide a wider range of testing categories by being a battle-tested and well-maintained open source testing framework. Although you can run TestNG from the command line, this handy little plug-in can run the suite directly from the IDE.
12.OsgiEquinox
The OsgiEquinox plug-in provides hotswap support for Eclipse platform development or Eclipse plug-in development.
13.Spring Tools 4 — For Spring Boot
The Spring framework is a popular Java dependency injection framework, but it is hard to tame without the right toolset. This set of tools is Spring Boot and the Spring Tools plug-in for Eclipse.
Spring Tools, which can go from nothing to a running Spring Boot application in seconds, is a plug-in for you to build Spring Boot-based enterprise applications.
14.Groovy Development Tools (GDT)
The Groovy programming language is more than just an Eclipse plug-in, but it’s worth getting to know the Java sibling as a tool for writing comprehensive tests in the IDE. GDT adds full-featured IDE support, including editors, wizards, debugging, refactoring, and search.
Ultimately, most Eclipse plug-ins are a trade-off because Eclipse is very slow and burdened by a large number of plug-ins. Be sure to take the time to evaluate each plug-in you find interesting to measure its contribution to your productivity, as well as its impact on the performance of your work tools.