More Eclipse? Yes, Plug-ins Galore

More Eclipse? Yes, Plug-ins Galore!

As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, at the time of this writing, a query on google.com for the words "eclipse" and "plug-in" resulted in millions of hits! Although this isn't an exact indication of the number of plug-ins out there for Eclipse, it should give you an idea of how active the Eclipse community is.

Eclipse.org Projects

For starters, always look for new plug-ins from the source, as we did with the WTP plug-ins. Also, recall the list of Eclipse projects I provided toward the beginning of the chapter, in Table 8.1.

Plug-in Directories

There are many plug-ins available on the eclipse.org website for the various Eclipse projects I mentioned earlier in this chapter. In addition, the following are two Eclipse plug-in directories worth checking out, because they provide a large number of plug-ins, both free and commercial:

• http://www.eclipseplugincentral.com/

• http://eclipse-plugins.2y.net/eclipse/

For example, on the eclipseplugincentral.com website, hundreds of plug-ins are organized in the following categories: Application Management, Application Server, Code Management, Database, Deployment, Documentation, Editor, Entertainment, Graphics, IDE, J2EE Development Platform, J2ME, Languages, Modeling, Network, Other, Profiling, Rich Client Applications, SCM, Source Code Analyzer, Team Development, Testing, Tools, UI, UML, Web, Web Services, and XML.

The plugins.2y.net site has even more categories. For example, their categories include "Ant, AspectJ, Bug Tracker, Business Process Tools, Code Generation, Code Generation/Modeling, Code mngt, Com, CORBA/IDL, Database, Database Persistence, Decompiler, Deployment, Distribution Package, Documentation, Entertainment, J2EE development platform, Languages, LDAP, Logging, Misc, Mobile/PDA, Modelling, Network, Obsolete, Patterns, Profiling, Project management, Report, Rich Client, RSS, SAP, SCM, Source Code Analyzer, Source Code Formatter, Team, Testing, Tomcat, Tools, Tutorial, UI, UI components, UML, Web, Web Service, and XML."

MyEclipseIDE.com

You might have noticed that I haven't mentioned many commercial products in this book. This isn't because I'm an open source fanaticI use many commercial products for my work. However, open source (and free) products are readily available for anyone to download; therefore, if you wanted to follow along an example in this book, it is easy to do without paying for a product. However, I have to point out one unique product and website found at http://myeclipseide.com. This is worth checking out, especially if you want a one-stop solution for plug-ins you will need for Java development, where everything under the sun (so to speak) can be found at one place.

The various categories on myeclipseide.com include "modeling and code generation (UML), web development tools (struts, spring, jsf, hibernate, DB, tapestry), productivity wizards (Web/EJB projects), application server integration (JBoss, WebLogic, Websphere, and more), packaging and installation (installer, and so on.)."

MyEclipseIDE.com is not a must-have, especially when projects such as Eclipse's Web Technologies Project (WTP) provide so much already. Furthermore, you could go out and get other plug-ins, such as the Hibernate plug-in from http://hibernate.org and the Spring IDE plug-in from http://springide.org. However, if you want one stop where you can find dozens of consistently organized plug-ins from one site (for a low price) along with support, myeclipseide.com might be for you.

Google.com

Of course, the largest directory in the world currently is google.com. You can find just about anything and everything using google.com searches. For example, I was able to locate EclipseUML (http://eclipseuml.com) by searching for the words "eclipse" and "uml".