Eclipse WebTools Is Driving Me Nuts

At some point Eclipse seems to have decided that I shouldn’t be doing J2EE development and randomly turned off some of it’s J2EE related features like being able to Run as server or create a new Webapp project. I suspect a software update went bad and it’s screwed over it’s configuration.

Sadly, with the massive number of plugins and crap that makes up an Eclipse install it’s nearly impossible to sort out if one particular plugin got corrupted, if it’s a configuration setting some that got corrupted or if the whole thing is foobar.  The log file for the workspace is particularly unhelpful just reporting that classes are missing – that’s great, where were you expecting to find them though? Which plugin provides that particular class and which plugin is requesting that particular class? Then on a subsequent run it just reports that the plugin is already loaded so it doesn’t need to load again – sadly, the plugin isn’t loaded and none of the functionality it provides is available.

So I’m downloading the web tools all in one package and hopefully that will work.  Then I’ve just got to add in the other plugins I use again and hope it still works.

In the mean time, maybe I’ll check out IDEA again…