sampa : colin’s blog

Most Eclipse users have probably missed the lack of any decent built-in XML, JSP, or HTML editors in Eclipse. There were a few completely free and open-source options which didn’t work too well or were not powerful enough, along with some free or low-cost options which were anywhere from a bit to a lot better (e.g. XML Buddy free version or paid version, JBoss-IDE, MyEclipseIDE, etc.). The problem with the latter is that these are really capabilities that should be part of Eclipse…

The Eclipse Web Tools Project, which is building off code donated by IBM plus code from Lomboz, has come out with their Milestone 2 release of the Web Standard Tools subproject.
http://download.eclipse.org/webtools/downloads/drops/S-1.0M2-200412230036/index.html

There are pretty decent XML, JSP, and HTML editors in there now. The XML editor has full tag and attribute completion, syntax highlighting and reformatting support, a separate logical tree view, and a number of other features. The JSP editor has syntax highlighting and reformatting support, and does tag and attribute completion, but also does code completion for embedded java code, which most other JSP editors don’t support. There is also support for defining and deploying to various servers. Pretty nice, after an initial look, anyway.

Note that as mentioned on the download page above, you do need Eclipse 3.1M4, and do need to install development versions of EMF, GEF, and JEM. These are normally available via the eclipse.org update site but since these are development versions, you’ll have to manually download and install them. You may want to see this blog entry for tips on installing these as external plugins, to make upgrading later easier.

If you want the XML editor to do validation based on the XML document DTD (and you probably do), you’ll also need to manually download and add Xerces as described here.

Finally, here’s an article which shows some of the server related functionality in this Milestone.