Ridiculously well integrated IDE and Application

This week I have been playing around a lot with Eclipse, which is an Integrated Development Environment platform, geared principally (but by no means exclusively) towards Java development. I've been an Eclipse user for some time, but principally for its ability to mediate nicely with my version control server (SubVersion), and the pleasantness of using the graphical editing tools. I was aware, though, of the huge potential it has for rapid application development, and finally got around to putting some time aside to investigate.

The product of my attempts have been documented here, on the DSpace wiki:

HOWTO Integrate DSpace with Eclipse and Tomcat

Along the way I found all sorts of goodies, like the Database Explorer tools, that allow me to execute SQL directly from files open in the editor onto my running database, and a variety of graphical and semi-graphical tools for editing my files. The full power of the source code analysis for a properly set-up project is staggering, as are the refactoring tools.

The real kicker, though, the feature that makes this effort all worthwhile is that I can now run DSpace (or any other web application) from within Eclipse. It looks after controlling Tomcat, and ties in the Tomcat debugger to Eclipse, so that (and this is the really cool bit) I can set points in my application source for execution to halt while I examine the state of the machine. So, I load a web page, which invokes code within which I have set "breakpoints", and Eclipse immediately takes over, opens up a debugging environment, and allows me to step through the code, line by line if I like, examining the in-memory objects all the way. Awesome. In the original sense of the word.

I've seen other people use similar functionality (for example in Visual Studio), so I'm glad I've replicated it in Eclipse. Of course, now I'll discover that everyone has been doing this for years, and I'm the last to catch on. But if I'm not the last to catch on, or at least to figure out how to get DSpace working in this environment (non-trivial) then I strongly encourage you to give this a go.