If you've spent any time doing Java programming with Eclipse it must have occurred to you that support for viewing and editing Jar files is a little limited. Having used Eclipse for over eighteen months, and since I hadn't yet built an Eclipse plugin, I decided to dive right in and build a viewer/editor that would let me stop using File Explorer or WinZip(1) for manipulating the Jar files in my projects. Hopefully forever.

Five days later here it is: JarPlug, the Java ARchive PLUGin for Eclipse (sorry... :). And what days: going up the learning curve of Eclipse plugin internals and trying to figure out a workflow paradigm for editing Jar files that made sense inside the Eclipse IDE. More on that later.