How Well Do You Know Eclipse?

Many experienced developers have a blind spot, sometimes they simply overlook obvious things. That's because experience can be a double edged sword. The learned often don't try hard enough to learn something new from the familiar. The Eclipse environment is a highly productive environment and it has made progress by leaps and bounds over just a few years. That exactly is the problem, it takes quite an effort to keep up with progress. So there are now more blindspots for the expert who learned to use Eclipse back when it was 2.0 or even earlier.

To illustrate, here's a couple of blog entries by Java professionals.

Alan Williamson, Java mentor and Java Developer's Journal author wrote:

I am using Eclipse3 and I am not sure if this feature was in the previous versions since I never noticed. As anyone that has done JTree work, it's a casting nightmare. So while you rattle out a bunch of code, the compiler moans of various class mismatchs. I accidentally right hand clicked on one problem in the Problem panel and discovered the 'Quick Fix' option. Having no idea what the hell it done, I ventured to click it once and never go near it again if it blew something up!

To my absolute surprise it fixed things for me! Put in the casts for me; even implemented the methods for the many interfaces that Swing makes your implement. Wow, what a time saver that has been. Its a wonderful piece of technology and I applaud the developer that implemented this. Job well done.

James Strachan, prolific open source author, wrote Jaxen, Dom4J, Maven, Jelly, Groovy, ActiveMQ and more wrote:

Really cool Eclipse demos...These are indeed great. I've used Eclipse for a while and I learnt some new tricks by watching these viewlets. All rich UI programs should come with viewlets like these to get you started and show you the neat tricks.

Thomas Davis, a professional Java developer writes:

An old friend stopped by the office today for an interview. During the Q&A I showed him Eclipse, and I explained some of the refactoring features. "This one," I said, "let's you move a method from one class to another, and all the dependencies are automatically updated." His response was, "And you trust it to do that!?" It just makes me wonder what sort of shoddy IDE's he's been using at his current job. Ha ha!

Solomon Dukis a New York based consultant writes:

User defined libraries in Eclipse I'm using WSAD 5.1.1 which translates to Eclipse 2.1.2. I have a large number of projects, and I'm trying to figure out how to simplify my set up. I'm trying to create a set of jars into a "library." Eclipse has a "Libraries" tab in the "Java Build Path" section of the Project Properties dialog. In there, there is an "Add Library" button which allows you to add JRE System Libraries and plugin libraries. Can I define my own library? Like many Java projects, my projects depend on a couple dozen jar files. I really don't like maintaining those jar files in each project...

Now if you are an experienced Eclipse user and you read these quotes you would ask yourself "how in the world did they miss that?!". It is becoming increasingly clear that what is entirely obvious (i.e. something that can be read in the manual) is being overlooked. I'm sure many developers have read the Eclipse help that described the capability they just overlooked, however it is most likey they simply forgot or they didn't pay enough intention. Therefore, the solution to this mental block is to provide the Eclipse tips and tricks in a format that is not only easily digestable but one that comes alive. "Essential Eclipse - The Visual Tutorial" delivers Eclipse tips and tricks in bite size portions and in live animation. It's always easier to recall something once you've seen it done before. All the tips and tricks that these pros missed are presented in living color on your desktop with the product. Think about it, it's worth the price of not looking like a fool in your next pair programming session.