Some Useful Eclipse Plugins for Flex Developers

These are some of the plugins I've been experimenting with lately to improve workflow, performance, etc.

AnyEdit Tools

Adds a bunch of useful tools into the right-click context menu, in a submenu called "Convert". My personal favorites are the "Convert -> Leading tabs to spaces" and "Convert -> Leading spaces to tabs". I know that the Flex Coding Conventions tell you not to use tabs, but I prefer tabs to spaces in my own code because it keeps everything nicely formatted and easy to maintain. If I need to say, paste some code into a blog entry, I use the AnyEdit tools to convert those tabs back to spaces so that it displays correctly. I also frequently copy and paste bits of code found on websites, the user documentation, etc. into my source, and want to convert those tabs back to spaces. Huge time saver!

• Convert -> Camel <-> Underscores
• Convert -> Leading tabs to spaces
• Convert -> Leading spaces to tabs
• Convert -> Chars to html entities
• Convert -> Html entities to chars
• Convert -> To / From Unicode notation
• Convert -> To / From Base64

RegEx Editor

This is a "View" that you can add to your perspective via Window -> Show View -> Other -> Regex Util. You can enter a regular expression and a string to test against. It supports syntax highlighting and has very useful tooltips for characters that are part of regular expression syntax.

Mylyn

I'm experimenting with using this at work to connect to our JIRA repository. (You could use it to connect to Adobe's bug tracking system too). Also works for Bugzilla, Trac, and possibly others. Its cool that it pops up a message right in Eclipse whenever a new task is assigned to you, and also that you can tightly integrate it into your regular workflow. The downside is that it seems to be lacking some of the basic features that the web interface has which (because of our system's configuration) prevents me from being able to create new tasks. Maybe I just need to wait another version or two?

Heap Status

I wrote a separate blog post about this a while back, its cool to be able to get a glimpse of how the VM is managing your memory.

Keep Resident

Uses some Windows hooks to try and keep Eclipse in memory as much as possible. Use this if you are experiencing frequent "hang-ups" with your IDE.

The performance of Eclipse (and other large Java applications) has long suffered due to the Windows virtual memory manager. Windows has a tendency to preemptively swap Java processes out of physical memory, even when there is still plenty of physical memory available. This interacts very poorly with Java processes, which do not have good locality and touch a lot of memory. The problem is exacerbated when Java performs garbage collection, which causes the Java process to touch lots of memory that has been paged out to disk. Ever had Eclipse randomly hang for 15-20 seconds? This is most likely the culprit.

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