Tim Holloway wrote:
The 2 primary advantages of plugins over stand-alone utilities are 1) you don't have to go screen-flipping every time you need a utility such as Ant or Maven. You can stay comfortably within the IDE display. Also 2) plugins are generally aware of the IDE environment and therefore integrate into the overall development process more effectively.
That's not true!
"1) you don't have to go screen-flipping" - No! With such plugins I do have to flip. And what makes it much worse, such a flipping in Eclipse is worse, than Alt+Tab in Linux or Windows. To use such plugins, I have to switch between multiple views in Eclipse: view with UML model, view with Database metadata, view for SQL execution, view for Reg-Exp builder, view for Ant build files, view for Deployment Descriptors, etc.
Using perspectives for different views with all these plugins does not reduce the complexity essentially. Partially can help opening of multiple Eclipse windows. But this doesn't help, if in one window is running some function with modal dialog, that is not capable to run in the background. In such case all Eclipse windows are disabled.
Running such tools as standalone applications, not as plugins, gives much more freedom and is very flexible. Flipping between such application windows is much faster, that looking for needed view in some perspective in Eclipse.