Fast-Start Eclipse for Testing and Debugging

During the development of my Eclipse plug-in (nWire) I had to test and fine-tune the behavior of the plug-ins upon startup. It's an annoying situation: you only have one shot for testing your code. If you want to retest, you have to stop and start over. This is especially annoying when loading Eclipse takes more than 10 seconds, which is usually the case. 

I found a simple solution which allows me to have a fully functional Eclipse instance in about 2-3 seconds. It is very simple to implement and can save a lot of time (and annoyance).

The solution is simple: disable all the plugins which are not necessary for your Eclipse instance to execute properly. This task is very simple if you know how... so here goes:

1. Create a new Launch Configuration for your plug-ins or start from an existing configuration and duplicate it. Naturally, it should be of type Eclipse Application. The fastest way to create such a configuration is to open the plugin.xml and click on "Launch as Eclipse Application".
2. Go to the third tab titles "Plug-ins".
3. In the top drop down "Launch With" select "plug-ins selected below only".
4. Click on "Deselect All". 
5. Select your plug-ins from the list. They will appear in the top section, under "Workspace".
6. Click "Add Required Plug-ins". 
7. Done. Click apply and you are ready to launch your configuration. 

A word of caution: this only works if you correctly define the required plug-ins for each of your newly developed plugins. If not, you will immediately notice the problem. This makes it a great way to test the correctness of your dependencies.

From http://blog.zvikico.com/

He is a entrepreneur and a software architect from Tel Aviv, Israel. He is also a technology freak with about 20 years experience working with computers. He is currently working on his first private initiative in the area of software development tools. His vision is to maximize the abilities of software developers by providing pragmatic tools that enable them to get fast results. Zviki is a DZone MVB and is not an employee of DZone and has posted 25 posts at DZone. You can read more from them at their website.