on Sep 18th, 2009I Love Refactoring in Eclipse
The refactoring support in Eclipse has always amazed me. Not only is there a refactoring for just about everything, many of the different Eclipse tools hook into the refactoring support. Frankly, I’ve come to take this all for granted. That is, until earlier this week.
As part of our contribution of the Toast example code from the upcoming OSGi and Equinox book to the Eclipse Examples project, I had to rename the bundles and packages and extensions and DS components and… for 81 bundles and features. Yikes! In the end it took me about 2 hours and both the client and the server just worked. What’s more, I did not change a single file in an editor by hand. Turning on all the replace options finds references in all files.
Old hat for many. Hidden power for some. For me, just using a tiny fraction of the time saved by the refactoring support to say Thanks to all the teams that contribute refactoring participants.
Related posts:
I agree, the refactoring support in Eclipse is top notch. And all is well if you use a SCM tool that can track history of renamed or moved elements. This is one of the reasons I’m not too fond of CVS. In many projects I’ve been involved with, it simply impeedes badly needed refactoring because people are concerned about loosing all history, creating merge havoc’s between branches, etc. The same can be said for Perforce.