Re: a modest proposal
Re: a modest proposal
- Subject: Re: a modest proposal
- From: Mark Lowe <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 13 Jun 2004 14:58:48 +0200
I think providing an example of how to write plugins like the EJB and
servlet wizards would be open enough. And let developers submit
their/our plugins somewhere. Thus freeing apple of the burden of
extending the J2EE stuff while focusing on basics like decent cvs
support.
This wouldn't compete with the likes of eclipse or netbeans but I think
there are a lot of folk who'd like to have a no nonsense ide that just
provides a central place to manage projects, with not too much
abstraction from the terminal (with ant et al) + text editor setup.
Eclipse users could pick an existing xcode project up by importing the
build files (i seem to recall its supposed to do that, Jdeveloper did).
But I think as long as all IDE's support ant, that should be to common
thread between all projects, and leave the tools up to the developer.
Perhaps code sense that sort of thing would be a nice feature one day,
but then that stuff promotes random try and test developing that I've
sat and watched folks using IDE tools do. Javadocs are good and i don't
mind reading them.
If anyone has any pointers on how to go about making wizard plugins and
such like, please let me know.
Mark
On 13 Jun 2004, at 13:07, joshua portway wrote:
or Netbeans.
I'm not meaning to put down the efforts of the XCode team, and there
are some things about XCode i like, but I just think that it's very
very hard for them to compete with the enormous amount of resources
poured into Netbeans or Eclipse.
Netbeans isn't the flavour of the month at the moment, like Eclipse, i
realise, but it's extraordinary modularity and flexibility are very
appealing. Plus the fact that it doesn't impose a Windows interface on
you like Eclipse. The underlying infrastructure of Netbeans is so much
more flexible than Eclipse, it would be a lot more suitable as an
XCode alternative. Please take a look at the Netbeans Metadata
Repository, for instance ( http://mdr.netbeans.org/ )- it abstracts
the underlying language model, so that the same tools (debuggers,
refactoring, editors, code browsers blah, blah, blah) can work with
different languages - for instance the same structure browsing
component can be used to visualise an XML file or a JAVA file. And
there's no reason it couldn't also be used with an Objective C file -
theoretically, you just have to write the language model. Once you've
done that you just inherit a lot of the functionality for free.
Netbeans is also by far the most open IDE I've ever used. Plus,
version 4 will be using ANT as it's build system, which means that
you'll be able to build a netbeans project without even needing the
ide. Needless to say, this also means that it wouldn't be difficult to
extend the build process to compiling other languages.
I know that the UI in the current version of netbeans (3.6) looks a
little dated. And I have NO IDEA why they seem to continually resist
putting the bloody menus in the menu bar on OSX (there was one
development build where they were up there, but it disappeared again
shortly afterwards). But take a brief look at the latest development
builds - a bit buggy at the moment, but the UI is looking up (well,
stealing ideas from IntelliJ, but maybe that's no bad thing) - and
anyway, with a bit of advice from Apple things could improve a lot in
that department.
Please don't take offence, lovely XCode developers, I know that a lot
of great work has gone into XCode. But it just seems that you have to
run as fast as you can just to hold onto the coat tails of the open
IDEs because they have literally hundreds or thousands of developers
working on them, and if all that talent and work could be leveraged
using a platform like Netbeans then you could be doing the work where
it really counts - breaking new ground and making the best IDE around,
rather than struggling to implement fundamental things like code
completion.
Of course, another alternative might be open up XCode, so that they
could harness the power of their developers to fix the thing, which
is, after all, why Netbeans and Eclipse are as great as they are. But
that doesn't seem to be likely (sigh).
j
On 12 Jun 2004, at 16:10, Frank Rimlinger wrote:
I just saw a really fine article on ADC promoting Eclipse:
http://developer.apple.com/tools/eclipse.html
The only trouble with Eclipse is that it is at heart a Windows
application, and some people (like me) just can't deal with that.
For example, you are boxed in to this one gigantic frame which is
supposed to take over your entire desktop. I brought this issue up
on the java-dev list and the response from the Eclipse crowd was
basically "we don't care--we don't have too."
But evidently Apple does care, so why not leave java on Xcode for
dead and divert resources to Eclipse development? There is a
precedent for this. Anybody remember OS 9?
frank
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