Tips and Tricks

I don't often feel the need to write about anything particularly technical here, but today I feel the need to publicize this excellent tutorials site. As an example of how useful I've found it, I had a peek at their Eclipse tutorials.

I've been using Eclipse for Java web application development for about 6 years now, and it's an excellent platform. However, there is a minor issue with upgrading eclipse versions. Each time you upgrade, you really need a clean install in the eclipse directory. So far, so good. The downside of this is that you lose all your plugins - one of the greatest strengths of the eclipse platforms - so that I usually have to write off a days work to do an upgrade (consequently, I'm still on the Europa release, as opposed to the more recent Ganymede release).

Now, this inertia isn't a huge problem; in fact, I'd say it's only an annoyance that hits once or twice a year, but it would be nice to have a solution.

Introducing 'externalised eclipse plugins'. It's surprising what you can learn when your not expecting to see anything remarkable on a site.

Now, you may say that any eclipse user worth their developer chops will have already have solved this problem three years ago, but so what. I'm still learning new vi tricks after more than 20 years daily use. But I'll take new learning any way I can get it.

So, if you're a developer in the Web arena, take a look at avaJava's Web Tutorials, you never know what might strike you.