Does any one know of any APEX refactoring tools?

Question

The company that owns the company that I work for has recently decided unilaterally that the salesforce.com and force.com platform are where we are headed. Currently, we're a C# .NET shop and we frequently use Visual Studio and Resharper in our daily work.

I'm not happy about this decision but, like any good developer, I'm willing to give it a chance and investigate this new technology to see what things might be like if I'm forced to make the decision to transition from a .NET to a APEX developer. So far, I must admit to not being all that impressed with the Force.com platform. To be fair, there are somethings that seem quite ok...but other things just suck...just look at their ideas on what constitute good unit tests.... Luckily, those sort of mistakes are something I can avoid by actually writing proper unit tests regardless of how much the people behind salesforce.com's documentation suck....

However, and sorry for the rant (I just really needed to get that off my chest), the one thing that I've found missing that I know I'd really miss is a good refactoring tool like Resharper. As a .NET developer, Resharper makes it possible to do a lot of heavy lifting that I would otherwise be hesitant to do. It also makes developing TDD style much easier cause I can easily create new methods and properties with just a few keystrokes. As such, I'm on the lookout for any sort of refactoring tool that is available for Eclipse and the APEX programming language. I've downloaded and installed the tools recommended by the force.com developers site but so far I have seen very little in the way of refactoring support.

Does anyone know of the existence of any refactoring tools for use with the APEX programming language?

Answer 1

As yet there are no tools that offer refactoring support for the Apex language.