Intro.
Following my last blog post that contained a few hints and tips on how to be more productive with Eclipse, I saw this video that DJ Adams posted over the weekend, along with this supporting blog post. As mentioned in my comments, the thing that stands out the most to me is the speed and ease DJ gets a nice looking application up and running, mostly due to his familiarity with UI5 but also because of how he is working with Sublime Text. I'd not seen the snippets and template shortcuts in action before but liked what I saw.
However, I'm a supporter of Eclipse for my SAP development, so after seeing how quickly DJ can get files and indeed applications up and running, I felt the gauntlet had been thrown down in terms of bringing similar templates and snippets to the world of Eclipse, for those brave/stupid* enough to use it as their IDE of choice. I haven't historically made use of the snippets functions in Eclipse but felt with UI5 taking over the world, now might be the time to change my position...
* Delete as appropriate.
What have I done?
No, not a cry of despair (well, maybe just a little!) - prompted by my current meddling with the boilerplate that HP Seitz demonstrated in his blog posting recently, I've been working on a kind of Desktop version. It's painful (as HP suggested it might be in the comments) trying to get a fully resolved template project for a desktop application as, by its very nature, it is much more complex than the cleaner sap.m based app's can be. I'm on the verge of chucking it up to GitHub so other, more able coders, can tidy up my mess (and in the process have a good chuckle at my code 
)
Getting back on track, I've just spent 10mins creating a couple of Snippets for Eclipse to mirror the type of functionality DJ shows in his video. I've uploaded them to GitHub (details to follow) so others can use & enhance them. Over time, I'll try to build up some more templates and snippets, along with some baseline Eclipse preferences files that support some of the content I put in my last blog posting. I hope more and more will contribute to this effort and share more snippets for Eclipse based UI5 work.
On top of this, I've saved a basic Eclipse preferences file that includes some of the settings I mentioned in the last posting. Unfortunately, Eclipse Kepler doesn't allow you to export/import perspectives, which is a shame, however I'm now working with this SAPUI5 perspective I've set up to be a bit less cluttered than the standard perspectives:
DetTheDevilails
| Description | URL |
|---|---|
| Root GitHub repository | wizbongre/EclipseUI5 · GitHub |
| snippets.xml containing Desktop & Mobile index.html files for UI5 | EclipseUI5/Snippets/snippets.xml at master · wizbongre/EclipseUI5 · GitHub |
| Preferences file (.epf) for baseline configuration from last blog post | EclipseUI5/Preferences/Eclipse Kepler Preferences.epf at master · wizbongre/EclipseUI5 · GitHub |
Summary
This is again only a starter for 10. As mentioned, I hope more Eclipse fans add further useful snippets and templates to the repo on GitHub. Hopefully DJ won't mind me using his GitHub repo for inspiration, as there is already some great and useful snippets in there for Sublime Text fans.
Also, as I mentioned in my last post, to get the most out of Eclipse you really need to invest time in customising it to work your way - as homework* from this posting, I'd like people to use the Window->Save Perspective As... and Window->Customise Perspective... options to have a play with how their Eclipse looks. Remember, you can create a completely new perspective that brings in views from others, as well as adding/deleting menu and toolbars.
*There is no reward or incentive whatsover for this.
As usual, I hope people find this useful. Please don't be shy with mocking adding to my GitHub repo.