Stefan Roock

To be really fast with an IDE developers need to be able to use the common IDE functions without the mouse. The functions used most often must be accessible with the keyboard only. Jesper Kamstrup Linnet has created a list of the Eclipse default key bindings. The default key bindings can be configured in Windows->Preferences->Workbench->Keys.

I will talk together with Martin Lippert about Large Refactorings at the Java Forum Stuttgart at 1st of july.

Sebastian Sanitz developed an Eclipse plugin which gives JUnit a voice – e.g. the voice of Homer Simpson. The plugin can be downloaded here. The plugin needs Eclipse 3.0M8 and JDK 1.4.2.

Here is a code snippet I found somewhere. Can you figure out what it does? Try code reading first and if that doesn’t work, write a unit test. Is there a way to refactor the code to be more readable without loosing performance? public int doSomething ( final int v[] ) { int i =…

The Agile Alliance provides access to a lot of good articles about agile methods: http://www.agilealliance.org/articles/index

Projects using EJB have a common problem: EJBs are necessary for some reason (e.g. scalability) but using EJBs does harm the development process and the flexibility of the application: The turn-around times (edit-compile-deploy-execute) are much longer with an application server than within a stand alone rich client application. If unit tests fail, there are two…

Exception handling is somewhat awesome for developers. Therefore some projects come to a point where they catch exceptions at a general level. A short article with some demo code illustrates the risks of catching exceptions at a general level (catching Exception in Java). I recommend following the „Crash Early“ tip described in The Pragmatic Programmer…

Nearly everybody would agree that giving communicating names to packages, classes, methods and fields is important. But when non-communicating names are in place developers often argue that naming is not that much important. The pragmatic programmers Andrew Hunt and David Thomas have a strong argument for the importance of naming on their web site (stroop…

Some useful online catalogs of patterns, refactorings etc.: Domain Driven Design Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture Design Patterns Refactorings Refactoring to Patterns

Today two major and incompatible UI libraries are available for Java developers: SUN’s Swing and IBM’s SWT (which is used for the Eclipse platform). Often it is claimed that SWT is the faster and more stable solution. Since in our projects Swing was fast and stable enough a point of major interest was the API:…