Sunday, November 25, 2007

Eclipse Europa -- I love you

I just updated from Eclipse 3.2 to 3.3, so I thought I would share how it went.

I has a bit of trepidation, because I use Eclipse every day. So, I unzipped the download into a new folder, and fired that up, then tested the 3.2 version. They coexist happily! So, that's a good start. Next, I tried to get my favorite plug-ins. Findbugs -- OK. JLint -- negatory! It seems that JLint is down for a while. Sadness. Subclipse -- OK. So, far, we have lost one thing I like, so it's not looking good.

Time for a little bug smashing. I had 232 warnings listed in the "Problems" tab. Lots of them are for unused imports. I pick one, get the quick fix suggestion, and then ask Eclipse to fix the rest. It works... oh my... this is great. Now I love love love Europa! JLint -- we hardly knew ye. One note -- I need more unit tests in the codebase. You could really do a lot of damage with these auto-fixes -- I may have done so by removing unused local variables. Sometimes crappy coders (like me in days of yore) would have important work done as a side effect of a method call which assigns a value to a local variable.

Quick note on the spell checker -- it's kind of hard to see how to invoke the suggested replacements. Ctrl + 1 is the secret handshake.

-Frank

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