Mark Beaty’s Blog

I was looking for an Eclipse plugin and found QuickREx . Very nice little plugin, and it comes with some other tools, like an XPath evaluator, multiple entry clipboard, and some HTML editing tools. The regular expression tester is nice as it can evaluate regular expressions using various expression engines, including Java, Perl, etc.

To install QuickREx, use the update feature in Eclipse as normal, using the following remote site URL:

http://www.bastian-bergerhoff.com/eclipse/features/

Instructions for using all of the tools can be found at that same URL.

I am not impressed with the Groovy Eclipse Plugin at all. I can’t even say that it’s usable. Why can’t I write and execute Groovy scripts without having to define an class with a main() method? I’m surprised it’s taking so long to get good Groovy support in Eclipse. I’m looking forward to receiving my free one-year IntelliJ license, if, in fact, it ever arrives (schwag from the 2GX Conference I attended). It’s supposed to have exceptional Groovy and Grails support. Until then, I guess it’s development the old fashioned way, and maybe I’ll purchase TextMate for my Mac. I like it’s simplicity.

Pulse looks pretty promising as a way to manage and share Eclipse installations (or “profiles” in Pulse-speak). I’m trying it out at work. We’ll see how it goes.

Converting blog to one focused primarily on software development… still trying to find a good developer-focused Wordpress theme…