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Last thursday was my first JUG.

First of all, what is a “JUG” ? Acronym of “Java User Group”, that is a meeting organized by people passionate about Java for other Java enthusiasts. Application architects, technical managers, software developers, members ot the open source community, students & teachers are all welcome to attend… and membership is free.

During this event, we can talk about everything dealing with Java technologies. Purpose is to share a common interest, share ideas and tricks, keeping in touch with latest java technologies & frameworks. Thus, JUGs facilitate the sharing of experience and information among its members. Topics are about the programming language itself but also tools, technos, best practices, methodology… There are many topics !

There are a lot of JUGs all over the world, mainly in big cities. You can take a look to the map to locate JUG.

I am currently living in Nantes, I naturally attend the JUG of Nantes, which is a new one, opening 1.5 year ago. Like most of JUGs, meetings are organized on a monthly basis after work (yeah, we are fan of Java…) and involve different speakers.

This week, we talked about agile software development (TDD & Scrum especially) and also we (try to) answer the question how to improve team productivity ?

On top of explaining us the TDD principles, the speaker also showed us some good tools to improve our productivity (Launchy, Total Commander among others) and a selection of agile Eclipse plug-ins (Mylin, EclEmma…).

Opening night of the first JUG in Nantes over a year ago

It was really interesting and I will attend to the next meeting… Particularly since I know that the next topic will be about Google technologies (Innovation Labs, GWT, Android…).

To know more about these groups, here is the official site.

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Here is a list presenting the most useful (and time saving) shortcuts for Eclipse.

Search

Ctrl + Shift + T : search for types.
Ctrl + Shift + R : search for resources, e.g. files.
Ctrl + H : open search dialog.
Ctrl + F : find and replace in the current opened file.
Ctrl + J : incremental search.
Ctrl + K, Ctrl + Shift + K : find next and find previous of the current selection.

Navigation / Code understanding

Ctrl + Clic : go to declaration of this variable, method, etc. (or F3 key).
Ctrl + Alt + H : open call Hierarchy.
Ctrl + T : show all implementing methods when used on a method in an interface, inheritance, etc.
Alt + Left, Alt + Right : go to previous or next editor position in history.
Ctrl + Q : go to the last edit location.
Ctrl + Shift + P : go to matching bracket.
Ctrl + Up, Ctrl + Down : scroll up / down in the editor.
Ctrl + Tab, Ctrl + pgUp, Ctrl + pgDown : switching between opened files (Alt+Tab like).
Ctrl + L : go to line number N.

Code editing

Alt + Up, Alt + Down : move line (or current selection) up / down.
Ctrl + D : delete line (or current selection).
Ctrl + Shift + C : comment or uncomment selection (//).

Refactoring

Ctrl + Space : content assist (autocompletion).
Ctrl + 1 : show “Quickfix”.
Ctrl + Shift + F : format source code.
Ctrl + Shift + O : organize the imports, import the missing imports.
ALT + S, R : getters & setters generation.
Alt + Shift + R : rename a variable, a method, etc.
Alt + Shift + J : javadoc template generation.

Other

Ctrl + Shift + L : list of available key bindings (very useful when you forget one !).
Ctrl + E : view the list of all opened files.
Ctrl + 3 : entry point for pratically everything inside Eclipse.