Paul, For what it's worth, I absolutely agree with you on the need for debugging support. I still follow the JDEE mailing list but I had to drop JDEE for Eclipse almost a year ago because of the lack of debugging support ... I can live with it on a small project, but on a large project (esp. when using Swing) JDEE really needs better means of debugging. Having said that, thanks for bringing JDEE to the world and it's continued enhancement.
Milan On February 21, 2003 03:30 pm, Paul Kinnucan wrote: > Dear JDEE Users, > > A number of recent threads have alluded to the need for the JDEE to > keep pace, featurewise, with the competition, e.g., Eclipse and > JBuilder. > > I'd like to present my perspective on this issue as the JDEE's lead > developer and maintainer. > > It is hopeless for the JDEE to try to compete feature-for-feature with > dedicated Java IDE's, especially commercial IDE's. The reason is that > the pure Java IDEs do not face the difficult skills and architectural > constraints than the JDEE development team faces, e.g., JDEE > development requires both Emacs Lisp and Java skills and is > constrained to standard I/O for interprocess communications. > > Why then bother with the JDEE? Because it allows Emacs users to use > Emacs to develop Java code. Put another way, the reason for choosing > the JDEE will always be Emacs and not the other way around. The JDEE > allows Emacs users to make the transition to Java development without > having to learn another environment. It also allows users who are, > like myself, working in a multilanguage environment (e.g., C/C++/Java) > to use a single environment for all their work. > > Where then should the JDEE development team focus its efforts. > The focus should be on those features that best > ensure that a decision to use Emacs for Java development > does not entail a loss of productivity compared to what other > environments afford. In my view, the JDEE's greatest deficiency > in this regard is in debugging support. Therefore, it is my > intention to focus my efforts personally in this area with the > goal of providing the JDEE ASAP, not with the best debugger available, > but at least one that does the basics well and reliably. > > Until then, other features that have been mentioned recently, such > as a plugin architecture and syntax errors on the fly, will move > forward only in so far as others work on them. > > Regards, > > Paul
