Eclipse setup for Java Development

Updated:

Marco Molteni

I regularly switch IDE for Java to stay updated with the different technologies. Usually, I switch between IntelliJ Ultimate, Netbeans, Eclipse (Spring Tools Suite 4) and Visual Studio Code.

Here there are some steps that I need to do when I switch to Eclipse.

My goal is to have a similar experience between the development environments.

Lombok

I use very often Lombok, its integration miss in the standard configuration of Eclipse.

In order to allow Eclipse to recognize and process Lombok’s annotations you need to manually install the plugin.

You have 2 methods:

Download Maven from their website and start the jar, it will install the plugin for Eclipse. You can follow these instructions.
Using the eclipse plugin installer using this installer: https://projectlombok.org/p2

Maven

If you want to profit of the autocomplete function when you edit your maven pom you have to ask Eclipse to update the Maven index when you start the project.

I find this feature important, when I am editing pom.xml files I like to see the list of versions available directly in the IDE without going to look around (library website o maven repository) for the latest version.

After the index is updated (it could take a while) you can use the autocomplete function in your pom.xml