One of the nice things about launching a tool is the opportunity it allows in talking to our users. Over the last 3+ months we have spent a great deal of time talking to development teams about Architexa, and have gotten a great deal of insight not only into what they like and don’t like about Architexa, but more importantly, what pains they have felt. The consensus is clear: while developers do need to focus on coding on a day-to-day basis, to be successful on a long term they need to worry about the parts of the system that are shared between team members. These worries where what we focused on for the most recent release (v2) or Architexa.
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Helios has been out for over a month – and we have been using it. Yes, we are a little biased, but when you are working with and leading teams of 10+ developers you need to be practical. There are a number of things that Eclipse does really well, but there are a few things that we would like to see better.

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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 »

Large projects often come with an independent (usually ant based) build system – so that the project can be built effectively in different situations. For programmers working on these projects, this often means setting up the IDE to work with these build systems. While working with development teams, I have seen way too many examples of the IDE not setup to take advantage of some of their features. Especially these days, IDE’s absolutely rock, so if you are not taking advantage of them then you are likely putting yourself at a disadvantage.

Below are a set of steps that you can follow to configure Eclipse to effectively work on your project:

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