Eclipse plugins you need

May 13th, 2009

Catchy title, worth to consider. While working on the AudioTool, we are continuously searching for better workflows. Joa Ebert has written two plugins for Eclipse that helps us a lot to deal with such a huge project.

To make it clear: I don't love Eclipse. It is still a love-hate relationship and I am often fighting against its philosophy. So far, nothing comparable platform-independent in sight.

MetaLaunch (free)
If your project consists of a bunch of SWCs, you often want to compile them first and your application afterward. Use MetaLaunch to launch several Eclipse launchers from a list.

PBDT - PixelBender Development Tool (free)
Adobe PixelBender Toolkit is not event worth to consider as a code editor, I am afraid. PBDT instead supports semantic highlightning and basic refactoring for your PixelBender shader source code. It even compiles your code in the background. This gives you a very nice workflow in developing shaders.

FDT - Flash Development Tool
Not to forget the sophisticated Actionscript development tool by powerflasher. People often think, you need to be an expert in Actionscript to get benefit from it and still prefer to use the Flash IDE. On the contrary, using FDT helps you learning AS3 with tons of useful features.

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12 Responses to “Eclipse plugins you need”

  1. C4RL05 Says:
    May 13th, 2009 at 9:37 am

    Great post Andre, and what Joa has done for the PixelBender workflow is amazing.

    I would also recommend the AnyEdit plugin to remove trailing whitespaces.

    http://andrei.gmxhome.de/anyedit/

  2. Mr. Bean Says:
    May 13th, 2009 at 10:55 am

    Last week I tried Netbeans on Ubuntu with Flexbeans. It is a lot faster than Eclipse. Cons: Flexbeans is version 1, without syntax highlighting, code-completion and good Flex compiler options.
    But it looks promising!

  3. Rob McCardle Says:
    May 13th, 2009 at 11:07 am

    Hi Andre,

    I found a really nice HTML editor for Eclipse that fits nicely inside the FDT perspective:

    http://www.robmccardle.com/wp/?p=52

    Also – LogWatcher can be hooked up to show a nice View for the Flashplayer log file http://graysky.sourceforge.net/

    Rob

  4. andre venancio Says:
    May 13th, 2009 at 11:32 am

    amazing work for eclipse!

  5. jb Says:
    May 13th, 2009 at 2:10 pm

    Flexbuilder is really powerful if you know and make use of the many shortcuts.

  6. Tek Says:
    May 13th, 2009 at 11:25 pm

    Another good plug-in is FlexBuilderTask. It allows to use //TODO and //FIXME tasks tags like in the Java editor.

    http://www.richinternet.de/blog/index.cfm?entry=911D4B57-0F0D-5A73-AF6F4D4D04099757

    I don’t know if it exists in FDT, but an entry exists on Adobe Flex Bugs to ask them to hav it native in Flex Builder : http://www.richinternet.de/blog/index.cfm?entry=911D4B57-0F0D-5A73-AF6F4D4D04099757
    (please vote if you want it).

  7. sascha/hdrs Says:
    May 14th, 2009 at 5:51 am

    love-hate relationship … says it pretty well! but luckily it’s more ‘love’ for me recently although Eclipse (or ultimately Java) is still an abysmal resource hog!

  8. Kim Says:
    May 14th, 2009 at 8:28 am

    Joas PlugIns are amazing – great job. We have also build an Eclipse PlugIn called Zarkov. It’s a compiler Wraper to simplify compiler tasks. It features ant taskdefinitions with autocompletion for every compilertask. Maybe you want to give it a try: http://zarkov.bigsource.de

  9. Alan Says:
    May 14th, 2009 at 4:02 pm

    FDT does have the //TODO:

    In fact it’s #14 on my “Tips for Editing…” blog post.
    Neverheard of MetaLaunch, could you elaborate on a workflow with it please? How is it differnet from running a pre-ANT task to compile stuff?

  10. Jan-Hendrik Says:
    May 30th, 2009 at 2:02 pm

    Hi Andre!

    Since FDT is able to do MXML now, using it really saved time !! :-)

    Thanks for pointing out MetaLunch, I didn’t know that before..

    JH

  11. Rob McCardle Says:
    June 2nd, 2009 at 3:30 pm

    One more from me, I found an ace SSAS plug in for FMS development. The original is for FMS 2 by a guy from FCZONE. The project appears to be discontinued but I can work fine with .asc in FMS3.5 using the JAR from here:

    http://www.igorcosta.org/?p=151

    Rob

    http://www.robmccardle.com

  12. veryhing Says:
    July 6th, 2009 at 2:14 am

    Fikret Diş Deposu very good