ECLIPSE

Prev don't be afraid of buying books Next

ECLIPSE Eclipse[URL 32] is a fairly new development environment that is becoming very popular. It was written by Object Technology International (OTI), a subsidiary of IBM. OTI is the company behind IBM's Smalltalk and Java tools. IBM's Websphere Application Development Studio (WSAD) is built on top of Eclipse. Eclipse is an open source project that is freely available for download. What makes Eclipse so interesting is how XP- and TDD-friendly it is. It should be no surprise that one of the people central to the Eclipse effort is Erich Gamma (coauthor of Design Patterns [19] and JUnit). JUnit integration Eclipse is architected as a common core platform and a series of plugins. In fact, the Java development environment is itself a set of Eclipse plugins. The JUnit plugin is of special interest, in particular for the way it is integrated into the Java toolset. JUnit plugin's features include: a TestCase creation wizard a TestSuite creation and updating wizard a deeply integrated TestRunner that provides: - a view for test results - the ability to hide packages in the stack trace - clickable test lists and stack trace (clicking opens the corresponding file/line in an editor) - an easy way to rerun tests an integration with the Run menus, allowing a class to be run as a JUnit Test, including in the debugger the ability to keep JUnit running to increase the speed of running tests, and to allow the rerunning of individual tests. Having JUnit integrated this tightly with the development environment greatly streamlines the TDD experience. Problem indication Eclipse indicates problems that will prevent code from compiling. Offending code is underlined with a wavy red line, and the line is flagged in the left margin with a yellow lightbulb. You can have Eclipse offer corrections by clicking on the lightbulb, or positioning the caret on the offending code and typing CTRL-1. Select a correction from the list to have it applied. Figure 6.7 shows an example of this in action. Figure 6.7. Problem indication and correction in Eclipse. This capability gets us to the point where we have a compiling, failing test very quickly. It really streamlines the process of letting the compiler tell you what you need to do. You can skip the manual process of compiling, checking the error messages, adding the appropriate stubs, etc. You can have Eclipse add the stubs as appropriate (including classes, interfaces, methods, instance variables, and local variables) while you are still thinking about the problem at hand. Then you can get on with making the test pass. Refactoring support Eclipse supports several automated refactorings that greatly speed development. Refactoring provided includes: Extracting a method Renaming a package Renaming a class or interface Renaming a method Renaming a field Renaming a local variable Renaming method parameters Reordering method parameters Extracting a local variable Inlining a local variable Self-encapsulating a field Replacing a local variable with a query Pulling members up to their superclass Moving static members between types Being able to use automated refactorings increases both your confidence, since the refactorings are proven not to introduce errors, and your speed, since you don't have to perform each step of the refactoring manually. Eclipse includes all of the standard features expected in an IDE, such as code assist, incremental compilation, documentation lookup, etc., all of which serve to streamline the programming process.

	Amazon