Eclipse in Action《Essence of Eclipse in action》

Chapter 1 Introduction

Eclipse is extensible.

Eclipse SDK comes with the Workbench JDT and PDE.

Chapter 2 Workbench

Scrapbook is convenient for testing experimental ideas.

Code generation can save some typing. the shortcut is Alt+/.

Preferences can be exported and imported.

Chapter 3 Testing Debugging Logging

Unit testing forces you to make the code more testable by splitting functionalities into helper methods which is good.

You can set up classpath variables and user libraries to make the build path configuration more flexiable.

JUnit wizard can generate test case class for a class under test but seems when you wanna add new methods it can't update the test case automatically. so you'd better write the test method first then use the quick fix to generate the stub method.

Local history you can specify days to keep files max file size max entries for each file.

Setting breakpoint properties can help alot when you only wanna suspend the execution in certain steps in a loop or only when a condition is met.

I prefer testing over logging over debugging.

Chapter 4 Working with source code in Elipse

Refactoring is the process of changing source code structure without changing its functionalities.

Chapter 5 Building with ANT

Nothing impressive.

Chapter 6 Source control with CVS

A patch is a collection of modifications that one user made to a project or several items in the project. this is useful at least in following 2 occasions 1 a read-only user may send the changes he has made to someone has the priviliages to commit. 2 import changes made in other branches.

Version is a snapshot of the project.

Branches are different revision lines for example bug fix branch after a stable release and a new version branch.

Chapter 7 Developing web applications

The stuff in this chapter is a kind of out of date.