I am participating the first time in a group writing project Darren Rowse started. The topic is “Top 5″ and I thought about a lot of personal top five lists but finally came to this one.

Every worker wants to get the most usage out of his tool. In case of the tool I am using for my daily work – Eclipse - this can only be done by extending it with the right plugins. So the following enumeration lists my favorite Eclipse plugins:

1. Web Tools Platform (WTP) – not really a plugin but THE extension for web developers. Based on a lot of code that IBM donated from their Web Application Developer the Eclipse Team and many other developers built a great environment for developing J2EE applications. Including
   • Editors for JSP, XML, XML Schema, XSLT, WSDL and many more
   • Wizards to create Webservice servers and clients
   • Validators
   • Server configuration for testing
   • and many more …
2. Subclipse – The built in support for CVS is great but if you want to an use SVN repository you need this plugin. It integrates perfect and works great – but still I hope that there will be built in support soon.
   
3. Eclipse SQL Explorer – Every application needs to store its data somewhere, right? This plugin allows you to control every database you can get a JDBC driver for – and even more with JDBC/ODBC. It does not matter if you just need to look up some values in a table or if you create the whole database from a script – with this plugin you can do it inside your IDE.
   
4. Eclipse Regular Expression Tester – From time to time you need the power of regular expressions. It may be in your application code or just to find something in your workspace by using the Eclipse search. With this plugin you can create the regular expression while live evaluating it on example text.
   
5. Spring IDE – Spring is such a great piece of OpenSource software. I do not have to say a lot about it. This plugin makes it much easier to create the xml configuration files with auto completion and validation.
   

Additionally I have to say that all these great plugins are free. They all are based on different OpenSource license and come to you at no cost.