Finding the right format for users to edit and view your Eclipse plugin’s data can be tricky. Eclipse provides many different types of editors for modification of its resources. Some examples of these are the Java, Text, JSP, XML, Ant editor etc. It also provides tabbed editors like the Plug In Manifest Editor which can have multiple sub editors as tabs in one editor. A simple example template to extend the tabbed editor when creating a new plug-in, is provided in Eclipse by default. For our project we needed to add a compare editor and a GEF editor as sub editors. This post should help you become more familiar with creating custom tabbed editors in Eclipse.

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Recently, while working on some collaboration functionality for our suite I got a chance to work on a REST (Representational State Transfer) based web server. There are many great resources about REST out there but most of them are quite technical and it took a me a while to get it. So, in this post I am trying to explain in some simple terms what I have understood about REST. read more »

Most of us agree to the benefits of using commands to provide the undo-redo functionality in an MVC based application. Working on one such highly interactive application, the question which often arises is where in the code base do the commands belong: in the model, in the controller or as a separate entity. This issue has been discussed before and people seem to have quite disparate views implying a vague understanding of this problem. In my view commands should be considered separate from both the model as well as the controller. This becomes really important while organizing your code to have clear abstraction boundaries and conform with the principles of cohesion and coupling.  read more »

Cohesion and Coupling are commonly used metrics to gauge the design quality of a software project with regards to maintainability, reuse and understandability. These issues are commonly faced by developers working with large codebases. The mantra for these issues is to have a highly cohesive and loosely coupled codebase.

Simply stating, Cohesion means placing related code in one particular unit and Coupling is the degree of dependency between two or more units. If the code is highly coupled i.e. different units depend a lot on each other and modifying one feature can cause unwanted side effects. To avoid these the developer has to understand each of the related classes to update the behavior safely. Loosely coupled code is easier to reuse and on modification does not have undesired ripple effects in the code base. Adding to the benefits highly cohesive code promotes easy code understandability as everything is placed closely together. These aspects are not restricted to classes but apply to everything from methods in a class to packages in a project.

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I have previously tried explaining Dependency Injection and how it can be beneficial to any project. This leads us to an important question about whether to use a framework or to do injection manually. Using a framework all the time may not provide you with additional control, rather at times it may further complicate the code. On the other hand implementing dependency injection manually can sometimes become more time consuming and painful. So how do we actually choose?
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When working with large code bases, finding your way around can sometime get quite challenging. In such cases, Eclipse makes a developer’s life a lot easier with its shortcuts and quick navigation features. Below is a compilation of a few shortcuts that I have found really useful.

Quick Navigation in the Workspace

While working with a large projects one of the challenges we face is to quickly find resources in the workspace. A very useful shortcut to find any kind of Java resource is Ctrl+Shift+T. It opens a dialog box to search for the needed resource and wildcards can be used in cases where you are not sure about the name of the class. Similarly Ctrl+Shift+R can be used to find any type of resource (even non Java) present in the workspace like jsp’s, xml’s etc. read more »

A lot has been written about Dependency Injection (DI) however, it still remains a complicated topic. The main articles on this topic are quite thorough and provide really good information but in the process, the basic principle behind DI becomes hard to comprehend. DI is in fact fairly simple – its main goal is removal of a class dependency on some code. This class dependency is then ‘injected’ into the code where it is needed. Using dependency injection helps in code maintenance, re-usability, testability, and improves code readability.

An Explanatory Example
In one of my projects, we needed to use DI to inject different implementations into a core service. Our project needed to be deployed to multiple types of servers while we wanted to share large portions of the core code and at the same time have different functionality for users.

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