If you haven’t played with Eclipse WTP and you do web development… then today is your day to start. I’ve been using it for about a month now and I’ve gotta say I am totally impressed with it.
The WTP is a set of plugins for Eclipse 3.1 that gives you very neat stuff to make web development that much easier (things like syntax colouring and command completion for HTML, JSP, JSTL, Javascript, CSS). Anyways, here are a few of the things I just love about it…
First off the bat is css tag completion… I always forget these..
And the completion is smart about potential values too..
I’ve been doing a lot of ajax stuff lately with DWR, and the WTP Javascript completion is just great. Does completion for your own functions too..
Next big fave is the JSTL completion. First class.. just love it…
And if that’s not enough to love there’s also a stack of J2EE plugins to do stuff like EJB wizards, Web Services wizards, embeddable app servers and the like…
There are supposed to be ways to upgrade to WTP straight from Eclipse 3.1 Update Manager… but I never got it working… They offer an “all-in-one” download with Eclipse + all the WTP stuff in a single tarball which is what I eventually retreated to. It also motivated me to finally sort out how to install plugins properly so I don’t have to install them again every time I upgrade Eclipse.
Anyways… big fan of WTP.. and the stuff coming in 1.5 looks very cool (including JSF, WS-Security, and EJB3 tool support). Big props to the Eclipse WTP dudes. Great stuff.