Eclipse Plugins Exposed, Part 1: A First Glimpse
02/09/2005
A while ago I was repairing my car. I had to remove a bolt. I opened my wrench kit and tried to find the right socket. None of them worked. The bolt was metric. I used the socket that was the closest to the ideal size. That was a bad idea; I stripped the bolt and I had to buy a special tool to remove it. The moral of the story: always use the right tool for the right job.
Eclipse is an extremely popular Java Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and a strong competitor to NetBeans/SunOne Studio, JBuilder, and IntelliJ IDEA. The Java programmer community is rapidly moving towards Eclipse, as it is free, open source, of excellent quality, and extremely customizable.
This new monthly column is about writing plugins in Eclipse. Who is this column for? Many Eclipse users simply use the IDE out of the box without needing customization. Many will be using plugins made by other people. That is not the target audience of this column. Some Eclipse users will want to customize it. Some will develop tools for their company's employees. Some will want to sell tools that connect to their products. Some will want to resell Eclipse under another name with these tools pre-installed. These people constitute the target audience. The prerequisites for starting to write Eclipse plugins are knowing how to use Eclipse and write Java programs, and having a good understanding of the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) and Swing.
In this first installment of the column, let's explore the Eclipse plugin environment.
Demonstrating Spring's Finesse
by Bruce A. Tate and Justin Gehtland
Author's note: In this excerpt from Chapter 8 of our book, Better, Faster, Lighter Java, we look at an example of an enterprise web application using the Spring framework. While Hibernate provided a single service, the Spring framework provides an efficient way to build and assemble Java applications, with abstractions for many services. Although it supports many services, Spring stays focused and clean with excellent layering and encapsulation. Like EJB, the centerpiece for Spring is a container, and like EJB, the Spring framework provides access to core J2EE services. But that's about as far as any similarities go. Here's a metaphor.
I love to kayak and spend a lot of time teaching kayaking skills. One of my specialties is teaching students how to roll an upside-down kayak in white water. One day, I was teaching this skill to a muscle-bound hulk and a dainty little 97lb woman. While I talked through the technique on dry land, Meathead stared into the distance, disinterested. The woman focused well and wanted to practice the foundation techniques over and over. Within a half an hour, she hit her first roll incredibly well, while he was just thrashing about, whipping the calm water into fine white foam. He didn't come close until his third session. In sessions to come, she relied on her technique to improve quickly; he relied on strength, and floundered. When it was time to put the skills into practice, she rolled while he swam. Programmers, take note: it's usually better to solve problems with simplicity and finesse rather than muscle.
Form Your Own Design Pattern Study Group
by Elisabeth Freeman, Eric Freeman, coauthors of Head First Design Patterns
04/06/2005
Sure, you can pick up a book on design patterns, breeze through it, and think you've learned something, but we all know patterns and object-oriented design are deep topics. Like most complex subjects, patterns are best learned over a period of time, not in a few sittings. Truly understanding patterns also requires a lot of thought, insight into the true intent of each pattern, comparing and contrasting a set of patterns, and considering the trade-offs in using the pattern (not to mention understanding the basic OO principles behind each pattern). Sometimes it also helps to have a helping hand to get you over those little humps of understanding that are, for the moment, just beyond your reach.
So we've got a suggestion for tackling patterns that's fun and social, and provides a great environment in which to learn patterns: form your own study group. What's involved? Just getting a group of interested individuals together and dedicating yourself to reading and talking about patterns on a weekly basis. Any group of interested individuals will do, but better yet, get your own engineering team together to study patterns on a weekly basis (and get paid while you do it!). Getting your own team together has another benefit as well, because patterns become even more powerful when your entire team understands the shared vocabulary created among the group members and the real underlying structure of the pattern.
