Persiflage and Piffle

As part of my investigations into the benefits of model driven techniques and DSLs I’ve been looking into some Java byte-code generation mechanisms. After I’d managed to get my masochistic hacker tendencies under control, I decided not to write a whole new class file generation framework myself and instead downloaded ASM and BCEL.

Essentially, I wanted to be able to generate Java classes on the fly from a DSL, and because I wanted to look at both ASM and BCEL, I setup the basics of my scenario to allow different class generators to be plugged in.
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In my why have all your eggs in one basket? blog post, I described how you could completely customise the structure of your Eclipse projects to be almost any thing you wanted. Perhaps though, I may have been a little misleading, and could have implied that I think that this kind of frigging around is a good thing.
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Whilst doing something with EMF (Eclipse Modelling Framework) recently I noticed some interesting behaviour when dealing with containment. I’ll describe it using two scenarios, each with an alternative.
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I’m a great fan of Eclipse but sometimes I’m disappointed with how people use it. I’ll give you a simple example; when you create a Java project you get the option to “Create separate source and output folders“. In my opinion, it’s good practice to always do this - and hopefully there are few these days who would try to argue that having source and generated artefacts together is a good thing.

But why do so many developers stop there; why put your test cases in the same directories as your application classes, why put the configuration in there too? The simple answer is don’t - create additional source folders. Right click the project and select “New->Source Folder” - it’s as simple as that.
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If you’ve ever used WebSphere Integration Developer (WID) and also do Java development, like me you’ll probably find having all the generated projects cluttering up your workspace quite annoying.
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I have many versions of Eclipse and Eclipse based IDEs installed and for each of these I like to be able to open my workspaces from the Windows explorer rather than from the Eclipse workspace launcher dialog. To acheive this I add an entry to the registry to add an entry when you right-click a directory.
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