In my Java project with Eclipse, I realized that next to the icon of each class appears an icon in the form of a cylinder? I would like to know what the meaning of this icon is:
In my Java project with Eclipse, I realized that next to the icon of each class appears an icon in the form of a cylinder? I would like to know what the meaning of this icon is:
When you use a version control system, such as Subversion or Git, the project is stored in a repository (server), usually different from the computer where the project is developed.
When you connect to that repository and download a project to modify it (in this case using the Eclipse IDE), a local copy of your files (usually all) is created on your computer.
Then you can make changes to your local copy of the project, and later, when everything is correct, upload your changes to the repository.
This allows collaborative work in parallel, since two programmers can modify different parts of their local copies of the project on different computers, to later upload their changes to the repository and synchronize with it.
Now, the symbol that you comment (the yellow cylinder) appears when the local copy of a file is in the same version as the repository file, that is, the last version of that file has been downloaded from the repository and not you have made changes to the local copy, so it is said that the file "is synchronized" or that it is in its latest version of the repository.
As a final point, in eclipse, when you modify a file from your local copy of the project, the yellow cylinder is changed to an asterisk, indicating that the changes in that file have not yet been uploaded to the repository.
Another case is when you create a new file in the local project, that is, it does not yet exist in the repository. In that case, a blue question mark appears, indicating that it is a file that only exists on your machine, so it will have to be uploaded to the repository so that the rest of the team has access to it.