Monday, January 19, 2004

Protocols Plugin. I've begun organizing some of my source code with Sten-Erik Bergner's Protocols Plugin for Eclipse.  What it does is provide a decent and clean way to organize the members of a Java class.  You declare section names and give it a sort order.  Then, in the Java Browsing perspective (not the Java perspective), you can drag and drop from the member types window into the list of member categories ("protocols"). The plugin organizes your source code as you go. What you end up with are pretty nice looking source files that have all members that correspond to a given category ("accessing", "creation", "event handling", or whatever) all bunched together, in sorted order.  When you're working with your code, you can click on any Protocol in the Protocols view and have your list of members filtered to include only members of that category.  When you're working with larger classes or more mature systems, this is a godsend.  You can quickly zero in on public stuff, property handlers, and whatever else you want. You can make up your own protocol names...I wrote a paper a while back that describes a series of method classifications.  I've made some protocol names that correspond to those.  3:03:43 PM