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

[Tassilo Horn <tassilo@member.fsf.org>]

Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com> writes:

Hi Lennart,

>> 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.

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