Killer "Slicing and Dicing" Eclipse Plugins

My last article talked about slicing and dicing Eclipse. Well thanks to Eclipse plugin architecture, an architecture that allows many to participate, here's a bunch of plug-ins that will make your jaw drop.

• Protocols - Dice your method names by grouping them under protocol categories. Now, if you had something like this for meta attributes, then you can have many ways to group your methods, just like Google mail has many ways to group your messages.
• JQuery - Slice and dice navigation. Why limit yourself from the fixed navigator views of Eclipse? Now you can have a tree to show information in anyway you want. Just kick off an arbitrary query (must know the query syntax though) and you'll have your custom navigator.
• AdvanQas - Slice and dice those pesky if statements and their respective conditionals. You have to see the Flash demo to see how jaw dropping this is.
• SubText - Slice and dice comments. Allows you to build Aspect like queries that creates information when you browse to a class that satisfies the query. Could be improved by making the information pop up a tool tips or added to the gutter. Nevertheless, a cool concept.
• Bugdel - Dice code by adding functionality on the fly. You have got to check out the flash demo in the site. It shows how automatically weave bytecode by select positions in your code, not only by building queries, but by using your mouse. Now if only it could weave the plugins too!

I get the goose-bumps looking at these plugins, it just opens up too many new possibilities. So, the next time you build a new framework, it may be wise to consider first how to best support it using an Eclipse plugin. Much of the success of a framework is tied to it usability. Just imagine a framework that is designed from the start with synergy with Eclipse in mind.

Interesting side note, all these plugins aren't made in America. Rather, they come from all over the world, that is Sweden, Canada, Russia, United Kingdom and Japan. Heck, Eclipse and IDEA aren't even built in the U.S.!