Category Archives: Tools

IntelliJ Live Template Tip – Autowired Dependencies

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Do you type these lines a lot?

@Autowired
private MyAwesomeService myAwesomeService;

Then try adding a Live Template to your IntelliJ settings that helps you reduce the number of keystrokes. Go to your Settings (Cmd+, on Mac or Ctrl+Alt+S on Windows) and find the Live Templates panel. On the right, select the ‘other’-group and click on the plus sign to add a new template.

Give the template a name (I chose auto and a description, then make sure it has a context of Java Declarations and the window looks somewhat like this:

live_template

Click ‘Edit Variables’ and make sure the TYPE variable has the expression set to expectedType() (this will open IntelliJ’s type completion box when the template activates). Then set the expression for VAR_NAME to suggesteVariableName() (this whill cause IntelliJ to suggest a name of the variable when you select the type).

template_vars

Now click Ok and close the Settings dialog. Go to your class file and at the place of an instance variable declaration, start typing auto and wait for the popup to show. Press Enter, type the name of your type and press Enter again, you should have a beautiful declaration.

–JH

Is Spring Boot rebooting Spring’s Ease of Use?

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Spring started out as a ‘small’ Dependency Injection container, which gave the Java world a whole new direction. Especially on the area of Java Enterprise, it offered innovations which allowed for faster and easier development of new Java applications.

In the last few years, Spring has grown enormously as a framework. The basics are still relatively simple, but due to the large number of different extensions it can be hard to start a new project. The people at Spring are familiar with this situation and are trying to remedy it with its newest addition: Spring Boot.

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Atlassian GreenHopper 5: Even Better Agile Planning

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Let’s get one thing out of the way: I love the Atlassian tools. At work we are sadly running way behind on the newest versions. Thanks to the Atlassian Starter licenses I can afford to fool around with the newest versions on my personal projects. Integrating the whole suite will give you a very strong support environment for your development.

About two weeks ago, Atlassian announced the 5.0 release of their agile planning tool GreenHopper. It is a great tool for creating and managing your project’s user stories, tasks and sprints. The drag and drop interface that allows you to move cards from sprint to sprint just like moving a post-it on a board has been improved. It now allows for editing almost anything on a task in-place, without having to leave the planning board.

Sadly I have not yet had the chance to try this project in an actual team. I mean, dragging cards across versions and sprints is cool, even when you are the only person on the project, but GreenHopper’s real power is in working with agile teams. Luckily there is light on the horizon. Next month I am going to participate in a relatively small innovation project, to perform some rapid prototyping. I have the responsibility for the development methodology and process and I intend to make full use of GreenHopper and demonstrate its value to at least the customer. Who knows, maybe we’ll finally upgrade the corporate software as well 🙂

Cheers!

–JH