One of the joyous things about working with other developers is finding out how they do things, and how they compare to your methodology. We found some great tools working with Otego (the Maven Cocoon plugin in particular), and now I'm finding some interesting ways of doing things from the guys at Hippo. They are very Windows-centric (only one Mac! The shame!), so for them a highly integrated development environment makes sense - thus, they seem to live in Eclipse.
Now for a bare-bones command-line guy, this is generally an abhorrent way of working (though YMMV). I usually live in the Terminal and TextMate, mainly because on my powerbook, Eclipse is slow. And I mean really slow - like, at times you have to watch the pizza wheel spin for a good few seconds before a file opens. Because of this and a whole list of gripes (Eclipse Sucks post coming real soon), developing in a full-on IDE often seems like a long-winded way to achieve productivity.
Having said all that, some plugins are rocking my world, and have been a real eye-opener for how you can achieve great things quickly, often despite the underlying OS. There are three in particular I'd like to highlight for offering things I've not found better equivalents for: oXygen XML, solex and WebDAVPilot.
The oxygen xml editor is yet another xml editor with syntax highlighting and so on, but it gets bonus points for creating closing tags and managing them nicely (something I've only seen emacs do), and for the visual xsd editor - it makes it much easier to write XML Schemas. Oxygen is a commercial product, but seems to be worth the money.
Solex does nothing you couldn't achieve using raw network dumps, but it wraps it up in a decent GUI and allows you to debug HTTP sessions quickly and effectively. I'm still only just exploring what this tool can do. Solex is released under the Apache Software License.
Finally, a notable mention for s&n's WebDAVPilot, that allows you to mount and explore a WebDAV repository from within Eclipse, including looking at attributes, permissions etc. It's rather rough around the edges, but mounting WebDAV repositories in Eclipse is infinitely preferable to doing so through the Finder, which is rather prone to hanging. Sadly, there doesn't appear to be any source available and there's no license information, so the rough edges can't be fixed. Can you help, Silent Penguin?
Posted by savs at January 25, 2006 8:54 AM