As a SAP Hybris developer, it’s not always easy to be productive when you’re spending just as much time trying to navigate your Integrated Development Environment (IDE) as you are writing code. Beyond this dilemma, it is also time-consuming to go back and manually check your code for mistakes, or to review a peer’s code for potential defects. Simply put, it takes a lot of lateral and even backward movement to move forward.

Despite these challenges, it’s all part of the job. But who doesn’t want their job to be just a little bit easier? I started thinking, “There must be a way to make life easier for me, my team, and the entire SAP Hybris development community!” And then I thought of the solution: a plugin for Eclipse, a popular IDE that can help increase productivity, ease navigation, and reduce mistakes in day-to-day work.

The Basics

First, the name: it’s called the SAP Hybris Developers Toolset, and it was built for SAP Hybris developers by SAP Hybris developers.

The main goal of the plugin is to simplify working with common SAP Hybris items like impex files and flexible search queries. The second goal is to allow importing and updating of extensions and their dependencies in one’s workspace based on analysis of the “localextensions.xml” file.

Furthermore, the plugin has many useful features, such as classpath rewriting, impex validation and running, flexible search running, extension and module generation, interceptor and populator creation with spring injection, and others.

(And if you’re already sold on the plugin, you can download it now through the Eclipse marketplace.)

Key Features

Here is a short video that demos the plugin’s key features:

For those who are interested in all of the features, you can download documentation of the plugin with descriptions here.

Comparison & Analysis

In comparison with other Eclipse SAP Hybris plugins on the marketplace, which generally provide only impex editor functionality, SAP Hybris Developers Toolset’s impex editor is more powerful and has a smarter suggestion algorithm (Camel Case typing is supported, for example). Also, it doesn’t require a running SAP Hybris instance and operates items.xml files in the workspace for building an internal system. In addition, it has many other features such as hyperlinks, folding, outlines, macros parsing, and more.

Here’s a breakdown of how the plugin compares to others in a few additional key areas:

• As an impex editor, the plugin provides many additional advantages, especially with impex validation and running.
• Other plugins don’t feature any Flexible Search Editor, but ours allows you to easily write correct queries and run them to see the results.
• For beginners at SAP Hybris and those who are not familiar with Flexible Search or SQL, the new plugin has Flexible Search Query Builder, which allows you to easily make a simple query via the UI builder and run it to see the result.
• There are desirable extra features in the “New wizard” menu. This command saves you time as you do not have to switch windows during extension creation, for example.

Conclusion

Overall, the plugin is a sizable upgrade compared to others available in the Eclipse marketplace, and the EPAM team is committed to making the plugin even more useful in the months to come.

So there you have it – a complete rundown of the plugin we created to solve common SAP Hybris development headaches. I hope you found this article useful, and be sure to download the plugin here to get started!