protocol7 archive
18 April 2006

Eclipse upgrade

Yesterday I upgraded to the Eclipse 3.2 RC1. As someone who tries to keep updated with new Eclipse releases, handling plugin updates has sucked. Now it sucks much less. I used the instructions by Colin to set up a new local extension location for plugins updated automatically and one for those I manage manually. I use a fair amount of plugins to extend the IDE. Some for real work (e.g. Subclipse, QuantumDB, Mevenide), some for trying out stuff I should know about (like the web tools).

While on the topic, the quality and amount of features that todays IDEs offer are just amazing. Given the incremental compiliation, code assist and refactoring support, the time I save on a daily basis is… a lot. Now, if Eclipse could just get a decent XML editor. And by that I don’t mean one of the commercial additions, with the importance of XML, a world-class editor should be a crucial part of any IDE: Eclipse isn’t even close.

tags: Java