I don’t think I would write something new to this topic because this year I kind of changed my sphere of action.

And to summarize the category I would like to post a link to the talk I gave on Adobe User Group Nederland.

It’s kind of embarrassing for me, because this video doesn’t put my presentation skills at the glance, but the content is quit interesting in my opinion. It is quit long though, it was a strange slot on this conference I got two hours. Too short for a tutorial and pretty long for a talk. But enough with explanations, here it is:

http://www.adobeusergroup.nl/site/list_messages/391

http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/03/egit-released

code_swarm: A Design Study in Organic Software Visualization from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.

Found it in this Talk:
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/ford-large-rails;jsessionid=3845F7FE536C1E9F18F22A67176001F3

When I worked in FDT Project I was always thinking about a contributor program, so when I leaved Powerflasher I arranged to start an OpenSource project for FDT. http://code.google.com/p/fdt-os/

And here is the first born out of this arrangement.

The Idea:
I was always interested in Software Metrics. I think it is a very strong instrument to improve your design, and detect code smell. Pflection gives you the possibility to reflect on your code (project) directly in your IDE. It also provides you with possibility to navigate to this code smells and think about refactoring .

So at the moment it is still work in progress I implemented only a few metrics, but it is more to go. And maybe I will start a parallel Project for JDT.

PS: If you want to try it out, navigate to this URL download the jar file and place it in your FDT/Eclipse “dropins/plugins” folder.

An IDE is not a Text Editor. It is a complex piece of software that helps you develop your projects faster.
In my opinion, static analysis is the heart of this software.
When you look at it closer most of the modern compiler also make static analysis on the code before they turn it to byte code.
This gives you a possibility to connect to the compiler and just visualize found errors in the editor.
But now you are facing some requirements for compiler. The compiler has to provide an interface for error collection, it has to be able to compile only the file you are working on, and it has to be very fast if you want to show errors live when the user is typing.
Eclipse JDT for example provides its own modified compiler for this purpose.

But still we covered only one problem, the error highlighting.

What’s about auto completion? For auto completion you also have to do static analysis to identify the scope the auto completion was triggered in and the possible proposals in this context. The static analysis for auto completion is much complex than by error highlighting. The user started to type something and now when his code is not complete he wants to auto complete it. The code is not complete so it won’t compile. I know only one compiler that is able to give auto completion suggestions (haXe).

A good IDE provide you also with ability to navigate/search/format and visualize your code.

Code generation is the next big feature that every IDE have to provide and it also have to be based on static analysis, because code generation should not break code. The generated code should be close to programmers intention. The main goal is you don’t have to modify generated code it should be formatted as you expected it should be placed where you expect it, you are ready to go to extend the generated code.

Refactoring is the key feature of every enhanced IDE and it’s also based on the static analysis because it is the same principle as by code generation: don’t break code, refactor it. Refactoring is also much complicated than just code generation. Because in refactoring you delete existing code and generate a new one. So the danger of breaking code is bigger.

Let’s discuss the second part of a good IDE, simplicity and management.
Creation of projects should be simple. People should be able to make shortcut’s for work flows they do frequently.
Frameworks and other technologies that are used by developers should be supported and seamless integrated in the IDE.
It should be easy to launch the developed application so you can have a look at result of your work at any stage.