Eclipse

Eclipse is:

• a very powerful Java IDE with many well-thought and very useful little details
• a mature platform for building and integrating all kinds of tools, be it text-oriented or graphical tools, tool for programming, for documentation or for any other purpose
• a framework to create productive java applications upon, which can use the plugin architecture and features that included plugins offer

Other than this, Eclipse is prove that an open, pluggable design really works also in large scale and in the real world.

There is a wide choice of extensions and tools for the Eclipse platform, ranging from simple "open dialog" improvements to comprehensive support for different programming languages, many of them are open source. See for instance Eclipse Plugin Central.

Eclipse Web Tools

Currently, besides the Java Development Tools, I work much with the Web Tools for Eclipse. I develop web applications that use Java ServerFaces 1.1 (JSF 1.1) for webpage generation and plain Java for the back-end (no Enterprise JavaBeans or such stuff).

The Web Tools Project is quite young compared with other Eclipse projects, especially the JSF support, which is still emerging.

Being dependent on the JSF support (and liking good tools ;-) ), I took some time to implement some smaller extensions to the JSF support. All of these have been filed as bugs with patches and hopefully will be integrated into the main distribution at some time. But if you are as impatient as I am, you can download "my" version of the JSF support below.

Please be aware that all this has not been tested very extensively! I always use the most current version below, and I didn't stumble across critical bugs (otherwise I would have fixed them...), but there is no guarantee whatsoever, and there are many scenarios I do not usually use!

Installation

1. Download the matching (milestone) version of the Web Tools from the Web Tools download site and install it along with all its prerequisites, or download only the Eclipse SDK and use the update manager with the update site http://download.eclipse.org/webtools/updates/ to install the matching version of Web Tools.
2. Copy the contents of the zip file below in the plugins directory of your Eclipse installation.
3. Restart Eclipse. Eclipse will use the modified plugins instead of the original ones

Uninstallation

Simply remove the modified plugin's jar files (all ending with "m") from the plugins directory.

Web Tools 3.0 M4

download JSF enhancements for WTP 3.0 M4 (contains source)

Web Tools 3.0 M3

download JSF enhancements for WTP 3.0 M3 (contains source)

What's changed?

• more informative error messages on type mismatch found by validation (bug 198984).
• content assist uses same symbol resolution logic as validation and therefore takes advantage of typed java5-lists/maps (bug 199853).
• more meaningful icons and description for beans, properties and messages in content assist (bug 171795), enhanced for bean symbols and message bundles
• improved content assist on message bundles (no bug yet)
• hyperlinking to java source and hover help for JSF Expression Language (EL) symbols (bug 175109), now clean thanks to enhancement in structured source editors.
• very provisional support for "var" variables in MyFaces Tomahawk's dataTable (no bug yet)

Web Tools 3.0 M2

download JSF enhancements for WTP 3.0 M2

What's changed?

• more informative error messages on type mismatch found by validation (bug 198984).
• content assist uses same symbol resolution logic as validation and therefor takes advantage of typed java5-lists/maps (bug 199853).
• more meaningful icons and some additional description for bean properties in content assist (bug 171795), enhanced for bean symbols and message bundles
• hyperlinking to java source and hover help¹ for JSF Expression Language (EL) symbols (bug 175109)

Web Tools 2.0 GA

download JSF enhancements for WTP 2.0 GA

What's changed?

• more meaningful icons and some additional description for bean properties in content assist (bug 171795)
• hyperlinking to java source and hover help¹ for JSF Expression Language (EL) symbols (bug 175109)
• allow user to disable faces-config editor intro page (bug 172696, mostly integrated)
• much faster EL validation by caching symbols etc. (bug 163890, integrated)

Web Tools 2.0 M6

download JSF enhancements for WTP 2.0 M6

What's changed?

• more meaningful icons and some additional description for bean properties in content assist (bug 171795)
• allow user to disable faces-config editor intro page (bug 172696)
• hyperlinking to java source and hover help¹ for JSF Expression Language (EL) symbols (bug 175109)
• much faster EL validation by caching symbols etc. (bug 163890)

¹Hover help contribution is a hack as of now. It works by contributing a JSF SourceViewerConfiguration for the jsp editor which is competing with the one org.eclpse.jst.jsp.ui offers. In my tests, always the "right" (JSF) SourceViewerConfiguration was taken, but this is probably mere luck. If hover help does not work for you, try disabling the SourceViewerConfiguration in org.eclipse.jst.jsp.ui (comment out the <sourceViewerConfiguration> tag in its plugin.xml). You won't loose anything, as the JSF SourceViewerConfiguaration inherits from the jsp.ui one. This is of course no "real" solution for the problem, but as things are, a real solution will take some time.