Help on design methods

Hey everyone,

I have decided I am getting into plugin making for Bukkit and have a question.

I am use to using visual studio and the class designer to help me organize my thoughts. However I am new to the Java IDE's and am continously getting lost/disorganised in my own code which results in me doing a complete rewrite many many times.

My question is: I am asking for advice on the best way to design a layout of the classes in Java and plugin design in general. Or just post on how you go about making a layout for your code

Thanks!

Edit: I have been using netbeans.

 

well I'm lucky and I have a nice big whiteboard at my disposal so generally i just start off by figuring out what is needed and draw it out on the whiteboard, and how it will interact with the other methods, I find that sometimes visually seeing it sometimes helps even when I have the layout in my head. Also comments, even if it's just javadoc comments so later when you go to update it, you remember what everything does.

 

I break my plugins down as far as i can over time, ie if something feels like it doesn't belong, it should probably be a different class or if your data structures start looking like this:

Code:

HashMap<Pair<Material, Block>, LinkedList<Pair<Player, Entity>>>

then you may want to break it down into separate classes even if they are essentially c/c++ structs