Re: Is JDEE moribund? Is Emacs a viable Java devel environment?

[Lennart Borgman]

On Sat, Apr 18, 2009 at 12:52 AM, Tassilo Horn <tassilo@member.fsf.org> wrote:
> Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com> writes:
>
> Hi Lennart,

Hi Tassilo,

>>> I hope someone starts writing an emacs interface to Eclim [1] anytime
>>> soon.  I had a quick look at the sources and it shouldn't be too
>>> hard, but it's quite a lot to do (to get all eclipse features).
>>>
>>> To me it seems that most java programmers use eclipse (or netbeans)
>>> anyway or switched to eclipse/NB, and there's noone feels preasured
>>> to enhance emacs in that direction.  And you can count me as one of
>>> those, sadly.  But I'm pretty sure that if someone would create an
>>> emacs interface to let's say only the autocompletion feature of
>>> eclipse using eclim, things would get running on their own.
>>
>> There has been very much done to CEDET now. Would it not be a good
>> idea to use CEDET for an interface to eclim?
>
> CEDET uses another approach.  It has it's own parsers and analyzers
> which enable it to do smart autocompletion and other intelligent stuff.
> This works quite well for C/C++, because Eric has put a lot of effort
> into it, and I highly appreciate that.

Maybe I am misunderstanding this, but I thought that CEDET is written
so that it can use external parsers etc.


> The eclim approach is very different.  Here an headless eclipse instance
> runs as a server in the background.  Vim does no intelligent source code
> analysis, instead it sends only a plain text command to eclipse like:
>
>   I'm in project Foo in file src/bar/Baz.java on position 18271 and now
>   I executed the completion command.  Gimme the completion list,
>   please.
>
> And so does eclipse.  Here the editors task is only to issue commands,
> let eclipse do the intelligent stuff, get back the results, and display
> it.  Very simple.
>
> IMO this is a great approach, because speaking honestly: Emacs cannot
> compete with eclipse for java (and probably other new, nifty languages
> like scala or groovy).  They have far more developers and academia as
> well as industry are focused on it.
>
> Anyway, no reason for sadness, the functionality is there ready for
> consumption.  So instead of reinventing the wheel, we should combine
> emacs' unsurpassed editing capabilities (eclipse extremely sucks in that
> respect) with eclipse's intelligent features where those are better than
> the emacs counterparts.
>
> Bye,
> Tassilo
>