The top feature of the eclipse IDE is the very impressive refactoring possibilities. It makes code feel like play-doh, allowing you to knead it in any shape way or form you think fits the current situation. A close second to that is the impressive templates and code assist. Yes, Java is verbose, but I think 80% of the …

As a long time user of Eclipse, I have never understood the any of the tabs of the Search panel in Eclipse. JavaScript search, Java Search, Remote Search, they all make no sense to a modern man who is used to a single search box which searches everything. So I always use the "File Search" Tab, which does …

A few months ago we had a problem where Eclipse could not automatically run all jUnit unit tests in a package if that package references a class called "enum", which is a reserved word in Java 1.6. I'll spare you the details, but we were forced to create a TestSuite. Normally we avoid this construction …

In our company, all Java projects are setup with Maven configuration so that after a "mvn eclipse:eclipse" any developer is generally good to go. One of these projects was a web project but would not transform into a WTP project. By running "mvn eclispe:eclipse" it became a Java project, but could …

In Java, the DateFormat.parse() method is a funny little critter. It helps you by trying to figure out what date you actually meant when you typed in "35/12/2O10" (note the letter "O" in 2O10). In this case, it will parse the date without errors or warnings, and returns the date "11/12/04" …

Today I (re)discovered a feature in the Ibatis data mapper framework which was clearly documented, but for some reason was not being used in our project. The feature is called "inline parameter maps" and combined with a wrapper bean it can clean up a lot of clutter in the code and in the SqlMaps. Please feel …

When you use Spring and Ibatis and SQLTemplates, you could have code in your project which looks somewhat like this: Connection connection = DataSourceUtils.getConnection(getDataSource()); ...<do connection stuff here>... DataSourceUtils.releaseConnection(connection, getDataSource()); Sonar will report that you …

I recently downloaded Eclipse 3.4.1 for Mac OSX, and tried starting it using the eclipse.app icon. It did not work, and I noticed a message in /var/log/system.log telling me that the JVM could not be loaded. After some Googling, I found out that Eclipse is not compatible with the new 64bit version of JDK 1.6 for the …

Last wednesday I was at J-Fall 2008, a fairly large event for Java programmers in the Netherlands. This event is organized by NLJUG. You can read some of my notes on the different sessions in my public evernote. Here's a one-minute impression of what J-Fall looked like this year: …

When using POI in any of your projects, and the application you're building is a web application, you probably have it running on a Windows machine. If not, you know all about the struggle with the "headless mode" environment setting to tell the JVM how to handle graphics rendering. I always like to keep my …