Just came across this interesting article describing refactoring scripts in Eclipse 3.2.
The idea seems quite cool and is meant to ease the transition within projects when refactorings are performed in separate branches, or between patches, or in 3rd party libraries, etc, forcing you to update your code due to these external refactored changes.
Essentially, refactoring scripts allow the refactor-or (ie. the person performing the refactoring) to create a script that records the process they're taking to refactor some item in their project.
Once they're done they make the script available and you're able to apply it in your environment to make the same changes. The benefit of this is that you apply the behavioural changes rather than looking always at the result.
For example if the other person had renamed a package, the refactoring script will rename all references to that package in your environment rather than you having to go through each file and fix import statements, etc. Nice idea.
Posted by crafterm at June 27, 2006 09:34 AM | TrackBack