Essential Eclipse Plugins: Source Control

Source Control or Version Control management tools are a reality of modern development, playing an essential role in helping teams collaborate and helping projects track code-base changes over time.

As I have moved from one team or organization to another, I have met different Source Control tools.

Whichever one you work with, there is probably an Eclipse plugin for it. Many are good enough that for day-to-day dev work you will never need to use the command line, saving those interactions for the rarer, more administratively difficult tasks.

The essential thing is to have a plugin for those day-to-day dev activities, but which one depends on your team's tool. I will touch on some of the best ones here.

Git is the current market leader for Source Control tools. See this link for one assessment of source control market share: https://rhodecode.com/insights/version-control-systems-2016 (I suspect that Git is not as far ahead as some charts suggest; those based on questions asked on help forums may be skewed high by Git's complexity, leading to more questions. Certainly I used the forums far more for Git-projects than for others!)

For Git, the excellent EGit plugin gives all you will need for day-to-day work. Branching, merging, committing, pulling and pushing, and more are readily available from the Git Repository view and context menus. The Interactive Rebase tool is also a great convenience. Highly recommended!

The next most popular source control tool is Subversion. The Eclipse Marketplace has two leading plugins for SVN. The one I am most familiar with is Subclipse. It integrates well with both Eclipse and SVN. It also optionally integrates with the Mylyn tool in Eclipse, and provides a Revision graph feature.

For all that I like Subclipse, though, the Subversive plugin is as or more popular on the Marketplace, and has been highly recommended to me. Since I have no personal experience with it, I will link to it but cannot offer any firsthand observations.

Summary:
How often I use it: daily
Usefulness: high
Star-rating (1-5): na
Download EGit: http://www.eclipse.org/egit/
Download Subclipse: http://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/subclipse
Download Subversive: http://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/subversive-svn-team-provider

Git Reset in Eclipse

Using Git and the Eclipse IDE, you have a series of commits in your branch history, but need to back up to an earlier version. The Git Reset feature is a powerful tool with just a whiff of danger, and is accessible with just a couple clicks in Eclipse. In Eclipse, switch to the History view. In my example it shows a series of 3 changes, 3 separate committed versions of the Person file. After commit 6d5ef3e, the HEAD (shown), Index, and Working Directory all have the same version, Person 3.0.

Scala Collections: A Group of groupBy() Examples

Scala provides a rich Collections API. Let's look at the useful groupBy() function. What does groupBy() do? It takes a collection, assesses each item in that collection against a discriminator function, and returns a Map data structure. Each key in the returned map is a distinct result of the discriminator function, and the key's corresponding value is another collection which contains all elements of the original one that evaluate the same way against the discriminator function. So, for example, here is a collection of Strings: val sports = Seq ("baseball", "ice hockey", "football", "basketball", "110m hurdles", "field hockey") Running it through the Scala interpreter produces this output showing our value's definition: sports: Seq[String] = List(baseball, ice hockey, football, basketball, 110m hurdles, field hockey) We can group those sports names by, say, their first letter. To do so, we need a disc

Java 8: Rewrite For-loops using Stream API

Java 8 Tip: Anytime you write a Java For-loop, ask yourself if you can rewrite it with the Streams API. Now that I have moved to Java 8 in my work and home development, whenever I want to use a For-loop, I write it and then see if I can rewrite it using the Stream API. For example: I have an object called myThing, some Collection-like data structure which contains an arbitrary number of Fields. Something has happened, and I want to set all of the fields to some common state, in my case "Hidden"

How to do Git Rebase in Eclipse

This is an abbreviated version of a fuller post about Git Rebase in Eclipse. See the longer one here : One side-effect of merging Git branches is that it leaves a Merge commit. This can create a history view something like: The clutter of parallel lines shows the life spans of those local branches, and extra commits (nine in the above screen-shot, marked by the green arrows icon). Check out this extreme-case history: http://agentdero.cachefly.net/unethicalblogger.com/images/branch_madness.jpeg Merge Commits show all the gory details of how the code base evolved. For some teams, that’s what they want or need, all the time. Others may find it unnecessarily long and cluttered. They prefer the history to tell the bigger story, and not dwell on tiny details like every trivial Merge-commit. Git Rebase offers us 2 benefits over Git Merge: First, Rebase allows us to clean up a set of local commits before pushing them to the shared, central repository. For this

Code Coverage in C#.NET Unit Tests - Setting up OpenCover

The purpose of this post is to be a brain-dump for how we set up and used OpenCover and ReportGenerator command-line tools for code coverage analysis and reporting in our projects. The documentation made some assumptions that took some digging to fully understand, so to save my (and maybe others') time and effort in the future, here are my notes. Our project, which I will call CEP for short, includes a handful of sub-projects within the same solution. They are a mix of Web APIs, ASP MVC applications and Class libraries. For Unit Tests, we chose to write them using the MSTest framework, along with the Moq mocking framework. As the various sub-projects evolved, we needed to know more about the coverage of our automated tests. What classes, methods and instructions had tests exercising them, and what ones did not? Code Coverage tools are conveniently built-in for Visual Studio 2017 Enterprise Edition, but not for our Professional Edition installations. Much less for any Commun

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