Moving Forward NOT looking back, Eclipse Helios

After having an on again off again relationship with eclipse for many years I decided to give it another shot, in part due to the influence of a work colleague. The current scratchpad project I am working on, fxassetman, incorporates a range of tools and libraries I am currently experimenting with. The core ones are as follows:

• Maven, the build tool I love and hate (sometimes on the same day)
• Spring Framework, my IOC of choice
• Hibernate
• Apache CXF, my WS stack of choice
• Logback, paired with sl4j this is a life saver for those of us that are logging control freaks

Most of these technologies, or those supporting them are well supported by the new Helios release. This in my opinion is the best release ever of eclipse, it just seems tighter, leaner and more responsive.

So for those which are not supported out of the box I have added a list of plugins, plus a few extra tools I just like to have around. This is my first cut list of additions to the base eclipse helios J2EE package:

• m2eclipse, damn fine integration of maven with eclipse, update site: http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org/sites/m2e
• AJDT, AspectJ development tools which is a requirement of Spring Tools, update site: http://download.eclipse.org/tools/ajdt/36/update
• Spring Tools, a must for spring based development, update site: http://dist.springsource.com/snapshot/TOOLS/nightly/e3.5

Being conscious of memory use and to limit this install to just the stuff I need I pretty much just install the core requirements from each of these update repositories. In the case of spring tools I do however install all components related to Spring MVC.

In addition to this I grab the subversive team provider, then select the latest version java based client SVNKit library, this actually needs to be done post install and pops up for selection after restart.

So that is about it at this stage however I do plan do a couple more updates with new additions, and yes I am SERIOUSLY over this stupid Australian Federal election, these cheesy slogans are pretty damn funny.