Essential Eclipse Plugins: Ant Visualization

Apache Ant is a pure-Java build tool that made quite a splash in its day, and did a great job superseding the Make tools.

Do people still use Ant? Many have moved to Maven or Gradle, but Ant has been around long enough that some projects have built quite complex structures of targets.

XML files that stretch into several hundreds of lines long, with calls and dependencies, can make understanding the Ant build script difficult enough, and maintaining it all the more challenging.

Any time I have had to modify a complex build file, I would start by sketching the targets and their relationships. This Eclipse plug-in does all that tracing and sketching for us, by creating a visual representation of the targets and their links. Much simpler and faster!

With an Ant build file open, linking the Ant Visualization view to it automatically generates a graphic of the structure.

The targets are laid out, with arrows pointing to the other targets on which one depends. Numbers show the sequence for multiple target dependencies.

The default target is colored with a grey shade. Double-click a target and its shade changes in the graph, while the editor jumps to that target and displays it.

Better still: the visualization is even more interactive than that. You can click and drag to change the layout of the visualization. If you need the image for documentation purposes, you can copy and paste it into your document, or export it as a .PNG file.

One important limitation is that it only shows targets in the open editor. Targets in imported files are not included in the visualization. That would be an essential improvement in a future release.

Summary:
How often I use it: occasional
Usefulness: medium
Star-rating (1-5): ****
Download: http://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/ant-visualization

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

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"

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.

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

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

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