Eclipse importing plugins and features from existing installation

Eclipse Juno released it's SR1 last week - so now seemed a right time to move away from our trusted Indigo SR2 to the Juno world. (Typically, we want to wait for an SR1 to ensure that all nagging issues with the new release are tackled with either fixes or workarounds are available from the community. Yes - this means that we are not on the bleeding edge, but caution in this case would be well-advised - after all we wouldn't want some nagging issue in the new release to set us back in productivity!) Update: Even the SR1 sucked!! Check out this if you don't believe me!

But what about the umpteen number of plugins that I had already installed with Indigo. You can either be lazy and wait for someone to tar an installation with most plugins required and then add the ones that are missing over again... or you can ask Eclipse to help you out. Starting from Indigo, Eclipse has a feature of importing the plugins and features from another installation. So you could download a vanilla copy of the JEE version from Eclipse's site and bring it up. Next, via File -> Import -> Installation -> From existing Installation, point it to where your previous Eclipse installation was present and presto, it will identify and import all compatible plugins. I have read about problems when plugins were incompatible, but luckily for me all plugins were compatible.

The code recommender and the JDT improvements are the two features of Juno that I am looking forward to the most!

References:

1. http://stackoverflow.com/a/11264964/874076

2. http://eclipsesource.com/blogs/2012/06/27/top-10-eclipse-juno-features/

Eclipse Debugger Step filtering

Ever noticed the T kind of an arrow in the Eclipse debug tab?

It is called "Use Step Filters" and seems a rather useful feature. Say you have code like:

            specialObjects.add(new SpecialClass1(new SpecialClass2(
                    new SpecialClass3(i, String.valueOf(i), Boolean
                            .valueOf(String.valueOf(i))))));

When you wish to debug to the constructor of SpecialClass2 using F5 (step into), Eclipse makes you jump through hoops taking you through a tour of Class Loaders, Security Managers, its internals, its grand-daddy's internals (sun.misc.* and com.sun.*) whereas what you really care about are your own classes. Enter Step Filters. Configure it via Windows-Preferences-Java-Debug-Step Filtering as shown and voila.

A "Step Into" operation skips classes from the packages listed out there. There are a few other options as well like filtering out getters/setters and static initializers, etc. which can also come in handy.

Happy Eclipsing!

References:

• http://www.eclipsezone.com/eclipse/forums/t83338.rhtml