Five Cool Features of Eclipse 3.5
(1) Block selection mode: works for cut, copy, and paste.
(2) Go to the implementation of an interface method.
(3)
Better completion of inner interface implementations: When completing
an interface such as Runnable, stubs for the methods are created
immediately (instead of on demand, via a quick fix, as a second step).
public static void main(String[] args) {
new Runnable() {
public void run() {
// TODO Auto-generated method stub
}
};
}
(4) “Invert if” quick fix (when the cursor is on the “if” keyword). Turns
public static void main(String[] args) {
if (args.length == 0) {
System.out.println("Need at least one argument.");
} else {
processArguments(args);
}
}
into
if (args.length != 0) {
processArguments(args);
} else {
System.out.println("Need at least one argument.");
}
(5) Improved systrace for inner classes. Completing the word “systrace” inserts a system.out.println() with the name of the current method (if you do println debugging, you’ll always find where the printing happens). Prior to 3.5, this did not work well for inner classes. This has been fixed:
public static void main(String[] args) {
new Runnable() {
public void run() {
System.out
.println("SidebarPanel.main(...).new Runnable() {...}.run()");
}
};
}
[Source of (2) and (4): Philip Mayer]
From http://2ality.blogspot.com
Axel Rauschmayer is a research assistant at the computer science department of the University of Munich. His interests include software engineering, semantic web, and web development. His current project is the connected information manager Hyena: http://hypergraphs.de/ Axel is a DZone MVB and is not an employee of DZone and has posted 14 posts at DZone. You can read more from them at their website.
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Comments
bwinterberg replied on Mon, 2009/08/24 - 8:08am
Nice Post. The 'invert if' quick fix is very nice! I prefer to code the shorter block first because it improves readablitiy. Now Im able to switch the blocks easily if one block or another increases in code. :)
Feel free to check out these 5 tweaks for Eclipse Galileo.
mpassell replied on Mon, 2009/08/24 - 10:45am
For readers stuck on Eclipse 3.4.x for some reason (MyEclipse!) or another, you should know that the "invert if" quick fix is available in 3.4 as well (and 3.3 for that matter).
--MattThe Software Grove
eriksensei replied on Mon, 2009/08/24 - 10:55am
JavaGP replied on Mon, 2009/08/24 - 1:01pm
zart colwin replied on Tue, 2009/08/25 - 2:54pm
in response to: JavaGP
This is the case if your libraries are inside one of the project that compose your current workspace. The trick is to create a project just to hold your shared libraries. Use the command File/New/Project.../General/Project to create the simplest possible project - these simple projects have no compiler, no facet, no nothing. Name it "Libraries", you can now put your shared libraries in this project and reference them using relative addressing.
ZartC.
bwinterberg replied on Mon, 2009/08/31 - 3:06pm
Adressing library paths relatively is supported by Eclipse since ... ehm... all times!?
Anyway I prefer Maven2 for managing library dependencies.
JavaGP replied on Wed, 2009/09/23 - 12:55pm
First of all, I have no desire to place all of my jars in a single project. Secondly placing them in a single project does not in any way address the problem that Eclipse does not support relative addressing.
I should be able to have a set of projects in any directory and reference dependencies in those projects relatively. I should be able to have different versions of these projects sets located in arbitrary directories and be able to reference dependencies within the other projects in the same set regardless of where the set is located on my filesystem.
Almost any other tool is going to support this basic, and extremely valuable feature. Ant supports relative addressing. The old Borland JBuilder supported relative addressing. Even a simple shell script would support relative addressing. It in incomprehensible why Eclipse would not support relative addressing or why people offer supposed work-arounds that do not in any way fix the basic problem.