Streamline your Eclipse workflows with Amazon Q Developer, now generally available

Today, we’re excited to announce the general availability of Amazon Q Developer plugin for the Eclipse integrated development environments (IDE). This release builds upon the developer experience introduced in our November 2024 public preview, bringing powerful AI-assisted development capabilities directly into Eclipse 2025-03(4.35.0) and later versions. The integration significantly improves how developers write, test, and maintain code by providing intelligent code suggestions, automated code generation, and real-time AI assistance within their familiar IDE environment.

Understanding the agentic coding experience

At its core, Amazon Q Developer functions as an intelligent coding companion in your Eclipse IDE, offering real-time collaboration through natural language interaction. What sets it apart is its agentic nature – Amazon Q Developer understands your project structure, can read and modify files, execute commands, and maintain conversation history throughout your development session. This deep integration helps developers stay focused within their IDE while leveraging AI assistance for various development tasks.

As a developer working on complex projects, I’m particularly excited to see Amazon Q Developer’s agentic coding experience now available in Eclipse IDE. It’s not just a passive tool – it’s an active participant that provides transparent reasoning for its suggestions and gives developers choice between automated modifications or step-by-step confirmation of changes. Amazon Q Developer maintains awareness of your entire conversation history and project workspace, making each interaction more meaningful and productive. This deep contextual understanding allows developers to receive accurate and targeted assistance, bringing the same powerful development experience that has already transformed how developers work in other IDEs.

Key Capabilities and Features

Amazon Q Developer brings a comprehensive set of capabilities designed to enhance your development workflow in Eclipse IDE:

Interactive development support: Through natural language interactions, Amazon Q Developer assists with code generation, bug fixing, tests and optimization. You can describe your requirements conversationally, and the Amazon Q Developer will suggest implementations while explaining its reasoning. This includes generating entire functions, classes, or application components while maintaining consistency with your existing codebase.

Context actions: Using special prompts like @workspace, @files, and @folders, Amazon Q Developer can access and understand specific parts of your project. For example, @workspace provides full visibility of your project structure, while @files lets you focus on specific files for targeted assistance. This granular control ensures that Amazon Q Developer’s responses are precisely tailored to the relevant parts of your codebase.

Rules and standards configuration: Teams can establish custom development standards by configuring rules in the .amazonq/rules/ directory. These rules govern coding standards, testing requirements, security protocols, and documentation practices. For example, you can define specific patterns for error handling, logging standards, or architectural preferences that Amazon Q Developer will follow in its suggestions and code generation.

Multi-language Support: Amazon Q Developer supports interactions in multiple languages, including English, Mandarin, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Korean, Hindi, and Portuguese. This allows developers to communicate with Amazon Q Developer in their preferred language while maintaining the same level of development support.

Let’s see it in Action

To begin using Amazon Q Developer for the first time, follow the steps in the Getting Started with Amazon Q Developer guide to access Amazon Q Developer. When using Amazon Q Developer, you can choose between Amazon Q Developer Pro, a paid subscription service, or Amazon Q Developer Free tier with AWS Builder ID user authentication.

For existing users, update to the new version. Refer to Using Amazon Q Developer in the IDE for activation instructions.

To start, you select the Amazon Q Developer icon in the IDE to open the chat interface. By default, agentic chat is turned on. You can turn off the agentic chat by toggling the button in the chat.

Amazon Q Developer’s welcome interface within Eclipse IDE

Start by describing your requirement in plain language

I started by asking Amazon Q Developer to help me create a REST API endpoint for user registration.

Help me create a REST API endpoint for user registration in the @workspace

After analyzing my workspace, Amazon Q Developer outlined a comprehensive plan that included creating a User model, registration controller, and setting up project dependencies. Noticing my project needed a proper build configuration, Amazon Q Developer proposed creating a Maven-based Spring Boot application structure and provided the necessary directory setup commands – demonstrating how Amazon Q Developer guides developers through the development process step by step.

Step-by-step project setup guidance from Amazon Q Developer

Amazon Q Developer provides a structured solution with explanation

Following Amazon Q Developer’s guidance, I quickly had a fully functional REST API endpoint for user registration. Amazon Q Developer provided a comprehensive implementation, including a proper Maven project structure, essential model classes with validation, a REST controller, and the main application class. Amazon Q Developer even outlined the API usage, showing the expected JSON request format and response structure. It’s impressive how Amazon Q Developer not only generated the code but also included practical notes on validation and suggestions for production-ready improvements, demonstrating its understanding of best practices in software development.

Complete REST API implementation summary with code examples

Build and run the application

With Amazon Q Developer’s guidance, I progressed from project setup to a running application. Amazon Q Developer helped me build the project successfully, and I was able to run the Spring Boot application, watching as it initialized and started up. The console output confirmed that Tomcat was running and my UserApiApplication had launched successfully, demonstrating how Amazon Q Developer streamlines the development process from code generation to a functioning API endpoint.

Amazon Q Develeper agentic coding builds the application

Successful build and launch of the Spring Boot REST API application

Multi-language support in Eclipse IDE

Side-by-side comparison of Amazon Q Developer conversations in English, Spanish, French and Hindi, all discussing the creation of a REST API endpoint for user registration in SpringBoot.

Q Developer supports multiple languages

Sample rules and standard setup for a project

A sample rule file for Spring Boot applications, stored in the .amazonq/rules directory at the project root, guides Amazon Q Developer’s actions.

# Spring Boot Project Setup for Eclipse IDE

Rules for setting up a standard Java Spring Boot 3-tier web application backend in Eclipse IDE

## Project Structure

Standard Spring Boot 3-tier application structure:
- `src/main/java/${packagePath}/controller`: REST controllers
- `src/main/java/${packagePath}/service`: Business logic services
- `src/main/java/${packagePath}/repository`: Data access repositories
- `src/main/java/${packagePath}/model`: Domain models/entities
- `src/main/java/${packagePath}/dto`: Data Transfer Objects
- `src/main/java/${packagePath}/exception`: Custom exceptions
- `src/main/java/${packagePath}/config`: Configuration classes
- `src/main/resources`: Configuration files, static resources, templates
- `src/test/java`: Test source code
- `src/test/resources`: Test configuration and resources

## Eclipse Configuration

Eclipse-specific settings:
- Java Compiler: Java 17
- Project Facets: Java
- Maven Integration
- Spring Tools 4 support

## Maven Configuration

Standard Maven configuration for Spring Boot:
- groupId: `${groupId:com.example}`
- artifactId: `${artifactId:demo}`
- version: `${version:0.0.1-SNAPSHOT}`
- name: `${name:demo}`
- description: `${description:Spring Boot Demo Project}`

### Dependencies
- org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-web
- org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-data-jpa
- org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-validation
- org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-test
- org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-devtools
- com.h2database:h2

## Application Properties

Standard application properties configuration:
```properties
# Server configuration
server.port=${serverPort:8080}
spring.application.name=${applicationName:demo}

# Database configuration
spring.datasource.url=jdbc:h2:mem:testdb
spring.datasource.driverClassName=org.h2.Driver
spring.datasource.username=sa
spring.datasource.password=password
spring.jpa.database-platform=org.hibernate.dialect.H2Dialect
spring.h2.console.enabled=true

# Logging
logging.level.root=INFO
logging.level.org.springframework.web=INFO
logging.level.org.hibernate=ERROR
```

Amazon Q Developer analyzes the workspace and creates a complete Spring Boot REST API project structure, including the Maven POM file, application properties, and appropriate directory hierarchy. It follows defined standard rules to ensure the project setup aligns with best practices, saving developers time and reducing setup complexity.

Getting Started

To begin using Amazon Q Developer in Eclipse IDE:

1. Install Eclipse IDE 2025-03 or later
2. Configure AWS credentials in your environment
3. Install Amazon Q Developer plugin from Eclipse Marketplace or go to Help > Eclipse Marketplace , search for Amazon Q > Install

Conclusion

With the addition of Amazon Q Developer in Eclipse IDE, developers now have access to AI-assisted development capabilities directly within their familiar development environment. The agentic coding experience brings an intelligent, interactive coding companion to Eclipse IDE users, enabling them to write, test, and maintain code more efficiently. Features like multi-language support , customizable rules for team standards, and powerful workspace commands make Amazon Q Developer a valuable addition to the Eclipse IDE ecosystem.

As we continue to enhance Amazon Q Developer’s agentic coding capabilities in Eclipse IDE, we remain committed to supporting developers in their daily development tasks. Amazon Q Developer actively participates in your development process, offering real-time suggestions, generating code, and adapting to your project’s specific needs. We invite you to explore Amazon Q Developer in Eclipse IDE and experience how this agentic AI can transform your development workflow.

To learn more about Amazon Q Developer’s features and pricing details, visit the Amazon Q Developer product page.