26 Jun 2013 , tagged: Eclipse, Java

Making Eclipse's Method Stubs Better and other things

Just downloaded Eclipse Kepler and I’m quite happy with it. It appears fast and stable so far, but that could be just that it’s a brand new install. Anyways, I re-added some of my usual code templates and while doing so, I discovered a few useful things. And because I keep doing this on every Eclipse installation, I decided to write this down here. On a related note, an Eclipse plugin to share your Eclipse templates would be pretty rad. But I digress.

SLF4J Logger

${:import(org.slf4j.Logger,org.slf4j.LoggerFactory)}
private static final Logger LOGGER = LoggerFactory.getLogger(${enclosing_type}.class);

This template will automatically create a new logger for the current type and import the necessary classes. I was unaware of the ${:import()} directive until today, but it is really useful.

Method Stubs

Per default Eclipse creates method stubs that look like this:

@Override
public Object myFunction() {
  // TODO Auto-generated method stub
  // return null;
}

This is convenient, but can be cause for bugs because you just get null. More than once I’ve been stung by this. So I decided a better way to deal with this is to replace the template with the following:

throw new UnsupportedOperationException("${enclosing_method}()");

Instead of returning a default value, the method stubs will now throw an exception. Forgot to implement it? No problem, you’ll find out very quickly. It’s debatable whether UnsupportedOperationException is the appropriate type for this, but in my opinion it works quite well.