Eclipse startup options or JVM Settings

In continuation to my other post on Eclipse, in this post I am detailing the startup options [which are also called JVM Settings] on Eclipse IDE. Eclipse startup is controlled by the options in eclipse.ini file present under Eclipse installation folder [i.e. $ECLIPSE_HOME]. By default, Eclipse comes with a set of values in this file. But those values are not optimized and might cause issues and / or hangs in large projects which might have huge codebase. These can be tuned further for better performance.

My startup options in my current version of Eclipse Juno i.e. v4.2.1 are below:

Please use these options as a reference and update eclipse.ini file [please do take a backup of this file prior to updating it]. Also, one more important point to note is, use the latest Sun / Oracle JDK for starting Eclipse. This also has a profound effect on the Eclipse startup time as well as the IDE functionality with a decent sized codebase.

Finally, in case you were looking for tuning the startup options of IntelliJ IDEA, please refer my earlier post which details the parameters for IDEA.

Update on 05th April, 2015: After a fair bit of time here, I have moved on to GitHub hosted Octopress blogs. Please find me on http://P7h.org henceforth for all new updates.

Eclipse Plugins

Eclipse was my main IDE for all my JavaEE and Web development all the time in my career. For all plain Java development and Android app development, I used to revert to IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition, which allows only plain Java development and not Enterprise Java development i.e. JavaEE or Web Development [Spring, Hibernate, Grails, etc]. For more info on what is allowed and what is not allowed in Community Edition, please refer this matrix on JetBrains website. Post the Mayan Doomsday Offer by JetBrains, thanks to the 75% steep discount on 20th December, I now have IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate Edition as well.

Eclipse is open source and is free to use. It is a thriving community for individuals and organizations which collaborate on commercially-friendly open source software. So, over a period of time Eclipse grew on all developers and almost everyone uses it as their main driver for development. And what's more with Scala, Groovy and Android teams giving support for Eclipse as the first IDE has given it a good momentum in the past few years. The plugin ecosystem is huge in Eclipse and in fact, these plugins have helped Eclipse grow as a platform what it is today. Such is the popularity of plugins in Eclipse ecosystem that they have also launched Marketplace for Eclipse plugins. If something is missing in Eclipse, don't worry, just check the Marketplace for the plugin or else you can develop a plugin in no time actually. That has been the mindset of a lot of Java developers in Eclipse ecosystem. There are thousands of plugins available for Eclipse right from customizing the IDE to Maven integration to Python IDE to Spring IDE, for Checkstyle, PMD, FindBugs, etc. 

With all my prior experience in using Eclipse, I have some goto plugins which I install the moment I get a brand new Eclipse version. Here is the list of all Eclipse plugins which I have used till now with a short description and the Eclipse Update Sites of the plugin.

Hope this was of some help to you.

Also, if you are interested in IntelliJ IDEA plugins, please check my earlier post which lists down all the IDEA plugins which I use.

Update on 05th April, 2015: After a fair bit of time here, I have moved on to GitHub hosted Octopress blogs. Please find me on http://P7h.org henceforth for all new updates.

Guava toString() method generator for IntelliJ IDEA

IntelliJ IDEA comes bundled with toString() plugin. If you check the plugins in Settings, you should find GenerateToString plugin, which generates toString() method with options for String concat, StringBuffer, StringBuilder and ToStringBuilder (of Apache Commons) for generating this method.

Google Guava has even better helper method for generating toString() method for a JavaBean or POJO, which is both clutter free and has a very consistent format; in the form of Objects.toStringHelper(this). It looks more elegant than any of the above solutions, actually. Also, as I make it a point to use Google Guava in all my projects, I have defined the following template in my toString() method generator settings in IntelliJ IDEA.

Follow the steps mentioned below for adding this template to your IntelliJ IDEA [picked up from SO]:

• Go inside a Java Class in an editor in IntelliJ IDEA
• Hit Alt + Insert to popup the "Generate" menu
• Choose toString()
• Click the "Settings" button
• Go to the "Templates" tab
• Create a new template named "Guava toString gen" (or any name you prefer)
• Add the above code to the template

Yes, its that simple!!  After configuring the above template, whenever you want to generate a toString() method for a Class, IntelliJ IDEA generates toString() using Guava template you have added just now.

Now, go ahead and give this a try and also check the other method omitNullValues() which might be useful in some scenarios.

Also, as a bonus tip, Guava's Objects class also has 2 awesome helper methods which aide in writing readable equals() and hashcode() methods. You should try them too.

Update on 05th April, 2015: After a fair bit of time here, I have moved on to GitHub hosted Octopress blogs. Please find me on http://P7h.org henceforth for all new updates.

JetBrains Mayan Doomsday Special Offers

JetBrains is offering steep discount of 75% on all their products which include IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm and a host of other awesome IDEs.

It is a limited period offer and to be precise its an offer only for 24 hours on 20^th December, 2012. So, what are you waiting for? Head over to their website and NOW!!

JetBrains Special Offer

Update on 05th April, 2015: After a fair bit of time here, I have moved on to GitHub hosted Octopress blogs. Please find me on http://P7h.org henceforth for all new updates.

IntelliJ IDEA Plugins

In continuation to my other post on IntelliJ IDEA, here are the plugins I am using currently.

Please check back after sometime, I will keep this list up-to-date with all the interesting plugins I come across.

For a complete list of plugins available in IntelliJ IDEA, please check this link. As of today, there are 865 plugins available for IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate Edition and 819 for IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition.

Update on 05th April, 2015: After a fair bit of time here, I have moved on to GitHub hosted Octopress blogs. Please find me on http://P7h.org henceforth for all new updates.

Performance Tuning of IntelliJ IDEA startup options

IntelliJ IDEA is my favorite IDE for my day-to-day work.

I do moonlight with Eclipse as well from time-to-time, but the sheer speed and power of IntelliJ pulls me back to IDEA every time.

I have found the following tuning parameters to be very useful for fast loading, caching, etc for IDE to function smoothly:

If you are using Windows 64-bit, please add the above config in idea64.exe.vmoptions file and if its 32-bit, please add these tuning parms to idea.exe.vmoptions present in <<IDEA_INSTALLED_LOCATION>>/bin folder.

Also, just in case if you are not aware, on a 64 bit machine, if you want to launch IntelliJ IDEA in 64 bit mode, you need to launch idea64.exe and not idea.exe. For this, ensure you have IDEA_JDK and IDEA_JDK_64 environment variables pointing to your 64 bit Java Installation folder.

Finally, the above IDEA Tuning parameters can also be used for an IntelliJ IDEA installed on a Linux machine as well.

Update on 05th April, 2015: After a fair bit of time here, I have moved on to GitHub hosted Octopress blogs. Please find me on http://P7h.org henceforth for all new updates.