Recommended Eclipse plugins

We love Eclipse and use it daily (and nightly) as our Java IDE. (Ok, we use Android Studio for the Android stuff these days).

Here’s our top pick of plugins for Java developers.<!--more-->

As a start point, we use Spring Tool Suite rather than the ‘generic Eclipse’ since we develop with Spring Boot heavily. When developing plugins for Eclipse itself we highly recommend starting with Eclipse PDE to save your time and sanity.

From the Eclipse marketplace (Help > marketplace):

• EclEmma : Our favourite code coverage plugin mainly since it has such nice UI integration allowing you to pin point areas of weakness.
• Findbugs : Code quality
• PMD : More code quality
• jDeodorant : Even more code quality
• Checkstyle : Even more code quality
• jAutodoc : removes (some of) the tedium from code documentation
• m2e-apt : Not much use on its own but combine with immutables for magic code generation.
• Gonsole : Git console inside Eclipse, great for mix and match with the Eclipse Git UI (though we also use GitKraken)
• Infinitest**: Automatically run your testing on every save
• PITclipse : Mutation testing for Eclipse
• Eclipse Class Decompiler : for when you want to quickly check out code and you don’t have the source.
• TestNG : We don’t use TestNG much ourselves, but its nice to have a plugin when developing against open source projects which do.

And of course you must install our spelling plugin which helps your ensure your code is readable (actual English words).

Optional, but we recommend you install Lombok in your IDE and to reduce your Java’s boilerplate.

Credit: Photo by Micah Williams on Unsplash