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Re: RE: Auto-completion in editors

• To: <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: RE: Auto-completion in editors
• From: "Rick Jelliffe" <ricko@a...>
• Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2002 22:59:23 +1100
• References: <3C57D6F1.23665.D5E4244C@localhost> <029601c1aa28$26af7010$0e00a8c0@b...>

From: "James Clark" <jjc@j...>

> > The difficulty is that IDE's (in my experience) rarely provide the high
> level
> > power and constructs that would be useful in a way that is unintrusive and
> > simple.  They "get in the way" more often than not
> 
> That's been my experience too.  Mostly I've used IDEs just for debugging and
> relied on Emacs for editing.  However, the current crop of Java IDEs is
> looking pretty good and they're starting to provide builtin XML support.  In
> particular, I've recently started using IntelliJ IDEA
> (http://www.intellij.com). What I like about is that is unintrusive, yet it
> has a deep understanding of Java that allows it to provide really useful
> assistance. 

There is a really interesting article comparing "syntax-directed" editors
and  "syntax-recognizing" editors inter alia at

http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/boshernitsan01harmonia.html

I think it has a direct relevance to XML editors: the Author/Editor family
is clearly from the syntax-directed line. I think the syntax-recognizing editors
have as much or more promise.  Of course, some domains have natural
mappings to visualizations, and a direct manipulation interface may be the
best for those (in the same way that a visual composer is so useful for
GUI construction). But I think in the next few years it will become clearer
which kinds of document types are suited to syntax-directed editors and
which to syntax-recognizing.  

The first decision point is of course whether the editor is used for marking
up pre-existing or partially tagged text.  When that is the case, the
kinds of syntax-directed editors we have at the moment do not provide
much help:  you cannot throw spaghetti at something that expects a tree.

On the IDE issue, I have been using Visual Age for Java in a 3  man
team for the last 9 months, and found it very useful, despite its steep
learning curve. Not a tool for casual users, its strengths are 
visual composition, version control, minimal JAR creation, diff, etc.  
I wouldn't like to go back to a non-integrated environment now, though it
certainly has its faults.   It has a nice non-intrusive interface
(in fact, a little too non-intrusive) and is fast for editing.

Cheers
Rick Jelliffe

• References:
  • RE: Auto-completion in editors
    • From: "Andrzej Jan Taramina" <andrzej@c...>
  • Re: RE: Auto-completion in editors
    • From: "James Clark" <jjc@j...>

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