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20040723 Friday July 23, 2004

Eclipse Tips From my Eclipse HowTo for Spring Live:

TIP: In order to clean up the project view in Eclipse, you can hide the files you don't need. First of all, make sure you're in the Java Perspective (Window → Open Perspective). Then click the little (down) arrow in the top right corner of the Package Explorer pane. Select Filters, check the "Name Filter Patterns" and type "*.jar" (no quotes) in the text field. Then in the list of elements, scroll down and check Referenced Libraries. Click OK to continue.

Another useful Eclipse trick is to use abbreviated package names. You probably won't need it on this project, but its nice on projects where you're inflicted with super.long.package.name.syndrome. Go to Window → Preferences → Java → Appearance. Check the "Compress all package names" checkbox and type "1." (no quotes) in the text field.

Want more tips? Ask Bill. Posted in Java at Jul 23 2004, 04:02:39 PM MDT 10 Comments

Eclipse Plugins Updated for 3.0 I finally got around to updating my Eclipse Plugins package for Eclipse 3.0 → Download or read the Release Notes. Below is a list of plugins included in this download. I dropped Lomboz and JSEditor b/c they didn't work at all with 3.0 on Windows - which I expect is the largest user base. Additions include CSS Editor and Doclipse.

Colorer and Jalopy don't work on OS X, so I wouldn't even bother installing them. Colorer has issues on Linux too. For OS X, I'd recommend buying a subscription to My Eclipse. It's only $30 and if you can afford a Mac, what's another $30? ;-) For a source code formatter on OS X, I recommend buying IDEA - it's only $200 - same cost principle applies. I tend to use IDEA a lot more on the Mac simply b/c it's faster and you don't need to install all these plugins. However, I've been stuck a lot in Eclipse-land lately because of it's multiple-project-in-one-pane support - as well as it copies and pastes code nicely into Word.

In addition to these plugins, I recommend installing the Spring IDE Plugin if you're using Spring [HowTo] - and Spindle if you're using Tapestry. Hopefully, distributions like this will become unnecessary with the introduction of the Web Tools project. Posted in Java at Jul 23 2004, 03:31:57 PM MDT 13 Comments

AppFuse discovers MySQL bug (on Windows) As I mentioned in this article, AppFuse sometimes helps me find bugs in other open source projects. Yesterday, it helped me find one in MySQL 4.1.3b (on Windows). Thanks to Mark for his quick response - he says it'll be fixed in 4.1.4. Posted in Java at Jul 23 2004, 07:36:24 AM MDT 1 Comment