Implementing Eclipse's "organize-imports" in Emacs Lisp

[Paul Michael Reilly <pmr@pajato.com>]

I probably spend half my time doing Java development in Emacs and the
other half in Eclipse.  I once tried to get the Eclipse plugin that
talks to Emacsclient to work better for me with only marginal success.
It is an option to revive this effort.  But even if this were to work
nicely, it's appeal is limited to Eclipse developers leaving NetBeans,
IntelliJ, JBuilder, etc. Users out of the solution space.

One of the Eclipse features that I find indispensable is the Organize
Imports feature which analyses the source file to determine if the
import statements need to be pruned, augmented or modified (based on
the .classpath file which is problematic since this file is an Eclipse
artifact).  I would dearly love to have this capability in Emacs.

Have either of the other two Java developers who use Emacs done this
perchance?  :-)  I'm guessing not.

Assuming it does not exist, I'd be inclined to create a Java
application to run in the background which provides an IPC mechanism
to talk to Emacs Lisp.  Then I would develop "features" in this proxy
app for Emacs that are more natural to implement in Java.  I'm
guessing that a "daemon" type app is better than a typical Unix tool
approach (because of painful start-up latencies that won't likely be
solved for a few years ubiquitously)

Anyone feel this is just a totally wrong way to go to solve the
problem?

-pmr