New Coding Toys in JDeveloper 11
It sometime seems that a lot of the coding features in JDeveloper go unnoticed by some users. For example, we get the "I can do this keyboard short-cut in Eclipse/IDE - how come it is not in JDeveloper" question - and in many cases it is in JDeveloper - you just need to know where to find it.
So I thought I'll start "documenting" some of the new features so they won't go un-noticed.
The first thing you'll notice is that the code editor in JDeveloper now has its own toolbar - which provide quick access to some of the functions. This might help you discover that we do have the following:
- Generate Accessors (now with new stronger feature then before)
- Surround with (mark a section of your code and surround with)
- Override Method/Implement Interface
- Reformat
- and bookmarks
All of these we had before - but some people didn't find them.
By the way to make it easier to access them we also added a source option to the right click menu in the editor.
Another object on the toolbar is the find window
Start typing something and JDeveloper will find it - and then use the arrows to navigate between the instances.
Note that you can click the little binoculars icon to set some search options.
One more new search option can be found under the search top menu is called "Auto Code Highlight" that will actually automatically highlight instances of the item you are standing on in the editor.
(In 10.1.3 there is an extension that does this).
In the source menu you'll also note some new things in 11 such as the:
- Generate constructor from fields
- Generate equal and hashcode
- Generate event notification
To make navigation easier in the go to class we added support for camel-case. Try this Ctrl and "-" and then type NuP - get the picture?
The quick Javadoc (ctrl+D) now also works for methods - so try this: get code insight for a variable that shows a list of methods - and then scroll to a method and press CTRL+D to get the scoop about it.
For easier code readability we added more syntax color options - make sure to go into tools->preferences->code editor and turn them on by checking the enable highlight box and formatting them. Note that some of them are not on by default. (again in 10.1.3 we had an extension that provided this).
There are other nice shortcuts like this out there - but these should keep you busy for now...
