Developing Storm

Tuesday, November 25, 2003
Eclipse has always had a lot of nice refactoring tools (and M5 of 3.0 introduces some nice new ones too). But the tool lacks one that I really want - the ability to force style conformance. Eclipse is pretty good with straight formatting but I'm talking about going one step further with variable renaming.

Like a lot of people I work on a project that strays (for good reason I believe) from the standard Java convention of leaving class and member variables undecorated. We use a leading underscore but I've seen folks that use m_ or i_ too. (I really hate the this. hack, its too optional. Unless there's a namespace conflict the compiler wont help you enforce the policy of using it). What I envision is a refactoring option called 'Force Conformance' that would not only style a document with the correct curly brace layout but also go through and rename all member variables so they adhere to a particular style.

As Ben Poole points out in this post sometimes its better to clip code from another project than it is to build a dependency between projects. Invariably when you take code from another project you need to spend some cycles reworking it to look like part of your system. A refactoring tool like this would make that a lot easier.


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