Vasanth Dharmaraj my thoughts on java, smartphones, stuff...

Xmind is an Open Source Eclipse based mind mapping tool. It can run as a stand alone application or as a plugin within Eclipse. The application looks good and has a decent set of features. It also lets you upload and share mindmaps on their site.

XMind, combined with online sharing service, provides a revolutionary way to enable both team brainstorming and personal mind mapping. With this major upgrade, we bring Web 2.0 concepts on community sharing into a popular desktop application. New Gantt view allows project managers to easily track project tasks and schedules. You’ll find many more useful and time-saving functions in XMind product family.

When reviewing or fixing some old code have you though where is this method called from? Eclipse provides a nice way to find that out. Just go to the method in Java Editor and press Ctrl+Alt+H. Eclipse opens up a Call Hierarchy view that show the method’s call chain.

You can also find the trace of the methods being called from the current method. Just use the icons in the view.

In Eclipse 3.5 there are a few significant enhancements. Now it looks and feels more like the Java Editor. It supports Content Assist, Code Formating, Hyperlinking, Java Doc on Hover and Quick Outline.

Code Assist

Code Hyperlinking

Quick Outline

JavaDoc on Hover

Genuitec has released WebKit for SWT. It is a embeddable WebKit based browser for Java. It is an SWT component so it can be added to any Eclipse RCP/SWT applications. They also plan to release a Swing based component later. Cool.

WebKit for SWT (ver. 0.5) is an embeddable Java™ WebKit browser component developed by Genuitec. This component can be used in the development of a wide range of Java SWT applications that require integration of rich HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and Flash content and functionality.

WebKit for SWT is being developed to serve as a technology platform for our OSS mobile web initiative, Eclipse FireFly Mobile Web DevKit and in the research of a new generation of network-based developer tools.

Default import style in Eclipse

Change it to suite your style

How
do you import class in Java? Do you import each class explicitly or use
the wildcard character to import the complete package? There are
aesthetic pros and cons with either approach. There is no performance
impact with either approach.

Eclipse provides a useful shortcut to Organize Imports: Ctrl + Shift + O. By default this imports each class explicitly. Not very useful when you want to import using the wildcard character.

There is a way to control how Eclipse organizes imports. Go to Window>Preferences>Java>Code Style>Organize Imports. There is an option to set the “Number of imports needed for .*“. Set that to “1“. This way you will always have the imports organized with the wildcard character.

You can also go hybrid by setting this value to say “5” and Eclipse will start using .* after five explicit imports. Cool.