I found e(fx)clipse core.di, core.adapter, core.text packages very good additions to Eclipse's own framework and then decided to factor out their code in an autonomous bundle: com.andrearichiardi.eclipse.addons.

To understand its features, try either this blog post or this other excerpt from the e(fx)clipse wiki

The new packaging removes all the Java 8 type annotations and adds retrolambda to backport new constructs to Java 6. Unfortunately, the core.text package makes use of java.util.function and java.time, and it has been momentarily excluded. Pull requests that finalize a JDK8-only build through a Maven profile are welcome. Kepler and E4 (Luna and higher) are supported.

The artifacts are available as snapshots on Maven Central. In order to get them, add the following lines to your settings.xml/pom.xml:

<repositories>
    ...
    <repository>
        <id>sonatype.oss.snapshots</id>
        <name>Sonatype OSS Snapshot Repository</name>
        <url>http://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/snapshots</url>
        <releases>
          <enabled>false</enabled>
        </releases>
        <snapshots>
          <enabled>true</enabled>
        </snapshots>
    </repository>
    ...
</repositories>

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.andrearichiardi.eclipse</groupId>
  <artifactId>com.andrearichiardi.eclipse.addons</artifactId>
  <version>1.0.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
</dependency>

In order to properly build using Maven, toolchains.xml needs to be configured with a suitable 1.6 path as the Execution Environment has been set to JavaSE-1.6 and Tycho's <useJDK> to BREE.

Eclipse Public License 1.0

The e(fx)clipse team made this possible.