During the JAX'08, I learned about some helpful tools - some being older, some newer, but for Eclipse RCP programmers or Java programmers in general maybe helpful. So here's a short bullet list of what I came across:
- The Nebula Project: Pretty cool widgets to include into your Eclipse RCP applications. If you want to have something that does not look all normal, but with some wow-effect, that's the place for you to go.
- Many people complain that RCP applications look to similar to the Eclipse IDE (and therefore too technical and not fancy enough), so here's another possibility to make something special out of your RCP app: Use Eclipse presentations! Kai Tödter provides an easy example how to do this with his MP3 Manager. If you want to see how far you can go with these presentations, have a look at Lotus Notes Hannover - but make sure to employ some full-time resources just for developing your RCP skin...
- The Plugin Spy will come as a feature of Ganymede (Eclipse 3.4) and really makes life much easier to find out what you are looking at (which class, extension, id etc.).
- The Eclipse Core Tools can be very useful for debugging - they give you some insight into places that are otherwise hidden from your view.
- Everybody who has problems with memory leaks in Java applications will very much enjoy the new contribution from SAP, the Memory Analyzer.
- Something already quite old, but definitely useful, is Pack200, a packager that is specialized on shrinking Jar files - which works very efficiently. Although jars are usually already zipped, their size can be reduced immensely by Pack200. This is useful for distribution, but you should be aware that you need to un-pack200 your jars before they can be read by the JVM. The new Eclipse provisioning system p2 will make use of Pack200, that's how I came across it. Apologies if you might now this tool since years already...
- If you want to "patronize" your developers a bit more, you can use AspectJ to enforce your architectural rules that you define. A nice starting point to do so is the PatternTesting project, which might give you an idea of how powerful AspectJ is for this purpose.