I am doing TDD on a large Java project in eclipse and am finding it frustrating because every time I run a test I have to wait 30 seconds+ for eclipse to compile and refresh. I estimate that 80%+ of that time is spent refreshing.
Is there a way I can drastically reduce the amount of refreshing it is doing? I have looked at server other similar questions but I could not see anything that helps.
One way I reduced the compile refresh time was to split the unit tests and code into separate projects. There are 4,700 classes in the src project and 300 in the tests. I am running eclipse 3.5.1 on Java 1.6.0_17-b04 (eclipse.vm). My computer is running windows xp with 3.1 gigs of usable ram. The only plugin I have installed is subclipse.
It turns out there were build errors in the project that did not affect the tests or the code I was working on but were there none the less. When I resolved all build errors in my eclipse workspace the issue with long refreshes when away. This was tested on eclipse 3.5 and 3.6.
I feel a little foolish now :(, but from what I have seen professionally there are a lot of people with lingering IDE build issues.