Cart
[Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries]
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
|
