REVIEW: Amazon’s AWS Toolkit for Eclipse Makes It Easier to Develop for the Cloud
I’ve done a fair amount of tinkering with cloud programming during the past couple of years. With cloud programming, you can easily deploy a Web application to a cluster of servers that will be distributed and managed with the help of the cloud infrastructure. But one of the hard parts is developing the software on your local development machines and then testing it against the cloud servers.
Amazon recognized this difficulty and has created a plug-in for the Eclipse IDE called AWS (Amazon Web Services) Toolkit for Eclipse. But don’t let the term “plug-in” fool you: I went into this evaluation expecting a single little dialog box with a few minimal features. I was pleasantly surprised to find full integration of AWS into Eclipse, providing complete control over managing remote instances, uploading code, running code remotely and even debugging remotely without leaving Eclipse.