[Sussex] Java Dev Environment

[Geoff Teale]

Dominic wrote:
--------------
<snippage>
> Many of you have discussed the quality of IDE, size of the 
> binary, huge
> functionality of 'emax thingy' ( :D ), but one of the other factors of
> an IDE for me, is that you can get up to speed with a subject 
> quickly by
> being able to "drag 'n drop" objects (and then alter them), scroll
> through a list of methods using 'intelli-sense', step through 
> code line
> by line with pretty colours signifying which piece of your 
> badly written
> code is going wrong now, see nice red wiggly lines under all my syntax
> errors and leap to context sensitive help pages from the 
> variable under
> my cursor which was placed there by a voice recognition plug-in (ok so
> this last one was a little extreme :) ).

I can understand a preference for full-on IDE's - they can be very nice and
helpful to use  - but I fear you may be judging the book by its cover.  The
reason a lot of developers frown on IDE's (other than machismo) is that they
often require you to surrender some control over your project in order to do
all the whizz-bang things they can do, and what were initally really helpful
features can end up just being a pain in bum (the discussion at the LUG meet
about VB's menu editor is a fine example).  Certainly any IDE that breaks if
I manually edit a makefile is not going to stay on my machine for long.

JDEE is really about bringing in some of the nice parts of IDE's without
sacrificing control.  By utilising the abilities of Emacs itself and using
it as a front end to a number of command line tools JDE provides syntax
highlighting, code completion / intellisense, context sensitive help,
interactive debugging (step through code), class and function browsing, CVS
integration, database browsing, highlighting of syntax errors, etc, etc,
etc.. , plus any other functionality that is available for Emacs (thus loads
including speech recognition and spoken response)).  

Now, I'm not that up on the Java IDE scene right now (a couple of years
back, when I was actively doing Java stuff, I tried JBuilder, Forte /
NetBeans, CodeWarrior.. etc..) but the only one that I know off that offers
this level of flexibility and power is Eclipse.  

Eclipse is infact very much like Emacs.  It provides a framwork for which
various plugins are written to create an integrated environemnt.  The
differences between Eclipse and Emacs are really only the following:

* Eclipse is written in java, emacs is written in LISP.
* Eclipse is prettier and makes GUI plugins easier to develop.  Emacs is
built in such a way that it's plugin functionality works under a windowing
system and at the command line.

... for these reasons I have been very entheusiastic about Eclipse, but
ultimately it looses out for the moment because:

* It's still too slow.
* It's still too buggy (or at least a lot of the plugins are)
* It doesn't have the range and depth of plugins and support that Emacs
does.

In time at least two of those things will get better and the other (speed)
will become less of an issue.  

-- 
GJT
Free Software, Free Society. 
http://www.fsf.org   http://www.gnu.org


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