As VP of Technology here I made the decision early on that everyone will be using open source software. All of our desktops run Gentoo linux using KDE.
Our recommended IDE is Eclipse. Mainly the other developer Ramsés is a big fan. I decided to try it for a while, but I’m afraid I’m not quite convinced yet. It’s just too confusing for me. I will make another concerted effort later on. My problem is that it is too difficult to do simple things like getting syntax highlighting on XML etc.
I’m still not sure I understand the whole Project metafor they use. It seems to be a mix of IBM’s VisualAge with real filesystem codes. But I’m not quite sure. Most of the Java stuff was pretty good though I have to say. That part of it appears excellent. The CVS integration was also pretty cool.
However I’m back on IntelliJ IDEA (for which I bought my own license a while back, so I havent completely broken the promise yet). I decided to try IntelliJs beta Aurora releases and have been using #859 for a few days and am relatively impressed with many of the new features. The stability of it isnt exactly what I am used to with IntelliJ. The pre 3.0 betas were mostly stable.
I’m not really interested in Aspects or GUI development so that doesnt excite me. However I am doing mainly Test based programming and I like the new JUnit integration. The little lightbulb feature is also much improved (it was always good). One new little subtle thing in typical IDEA fashion that theyve added is the kind of realtime visual diff like kind of feature. It marks all the areas that you’ve changed in your code with a minty green bar on both the left side and on the right overview bar.
This entry was posted in the following Categories: Java
You can use Ant editor in Eclipse to have highliging in XML editors. Just make it default editor for all *.xml, *.xsl, etc. files. By default it is only enabled for build.xml
Posted by: eu on July 18, 2003 01:23 PMThanks for the pointers. I had no idea that the ant editor could be used for other things. (Actually I'm lying I had no idea that there was an ant editor).
The point I´m making is that I shouldnt have to do this for something so basic as editing XML. I know it used to be the same for JSPs as well. Not sure if thats the case as I dont really do much with them anymore.
For example, why isnt the ant editor enabled by default for .xml. Doesnt that make sense.
I did go to the site mentioned above as well, but Im afraid Im not patient enough at the moment to go through all of them. I guess I wasnt patient enough. I did download one or two and unpacked them in the plugin directory. Then I had to figure out how to change it etc. 5 minutes later I started back in IDEA.
-P
Posted by: Pelle on July 18, 2003 04:49 PM