Java – How to start designing portlets in Eclipse

The three most influential factors for Eclipse speed are:

• Using the latest version of Eclipse (2020-06 as on 26 June 2020)
  Note that David Balažic's comment (July 2014) contradicts that criteria which was working six years ago:

The "same" workspace in Indigo (3.7.2) SR2 loads in 4 seconds, in Kepler SR2 (4.3.2) in 7 seconds and in Luna (4.4.0) in 10 seconds. All are Java EE bundles. Newer versions have more bundled plugins, but still the trend is obvious. (by "same" workspace I mean: same (additionally installed) plugins used, same projects checked out from version control).

• Launching it with the latest JDK (Java 14 at the time of writing, which does not prevent you to compile in your Eclipse project with any other JDK you want: 1.4.2, 1.5, 1.6 older...)

    -vm jdk1.6.0_10\jre\bin\client\jvm.dll
  

• Configuring the eclipse.ini (see this question for a complete eclipse.ini)

    -Xms512m
    -Xmx4096m
    [...]
  

The Xmx argument is the amount of memory Eclipse will get (in simple terms). With -Xmx4g, it gets 4 GB of RAM, etc.

Note:

1. Referring to the jvm.dll has advantages:

• Splash screen coming up sooner.
• Eclipse.exe in the process list instead of java.exe.
• Firewalls: Eclipse wants access to the Internet instead of Java.
• Window management branding issues, especially on Windows and Mac.

Dec. 2020, Udo conforms in the comments

From version 4.8 (Photon) an up there was a steady speed gain after each version.
The main platform was optimized every release to load faster, enable more features for the dark theme and to add more features for newer Java versions for the Java development tools.
Especially with-in the last 3 versions the startup time was increased a lot. There should be a significant increase in start-up time with the newest version of Eclipse 2020-12.

In my experience it started a lot faster with each new version.
But: There are still plug-ins which do not follow the new way of using the Eclipse API and are therefore still slow to start.
Since the change to Java 11 as the minimum runtime version starting from Eclipse version 2020-09 at least the core system uses the newer features of the JVM. It is up to the providers of the other plug-ins to upgrade to newer APIs and to use the full power of modern CPUs (e.g. concurrent programming model).

Update: June-2021

For a specific case when you need all query params:

const urlSearchParams = new URLSearchParams(window.location.search);
const params = Object.fromEntries(urlSearchParams.entries());

Update: Sep-2018

You can use URLSearchParams which is simple and has decent (but not complete) browser support.

const urlParams = new URLSearchParams(window.location.search);
const myParam = urlParams.get('myParam');

Original

You don't need jQuery for that purpose. You can use just some pure JavaScript:

function getParameterByName(name, url = window.location.href) {
    name = name.replace(/[\[\]]/g, '\\$&');
    var regex = new RegExp('[?&]' + name + '(=([^&#]*)|&|#|$)'),
        results = regex.exec(url);
    if (!results) return null;
    if (!results[2]) return '';
    return decodeURIComponent(results[2].replace(/\+/g, ' '));
}

Usage:

// query string: ?foo=lorem&bar=&baz
var foo = getParameterByName('foo'); // "lorem"
var bar = getParameterByName('bar'); // "" (present with empty value)
var baz = getParameterByName('baz'); // "" (present with no value)
var qux = getParameterByName('qux'); // null (absent)

NOTE: If a parameter is present several times (?foo=lorem&foo=ipsum), you will get the first value (lorem). There is no standard about this and usages vary, see for example this question: Authoritative position of duplicate HTTP GET query keys.

NOTE: The function is case-sensitive. If you prefer case-insensitive parameter name, add 'i' modifier to RegExp

NOTE: If you're getting a no-useless-escape eslint error, you can replace name = name.replace(/[\[\]]/g, '\\$&'); with name = name.replace(/[[\]]/g, '\\$&').

This is an update based on the new URLSearchParams specs to achieve the same result more succinctly. See answer titled "URLSearchParams" below.