Why Eclipse

[jmelzer]

Hi all.

is there a really good reason to use Eclipse for the Spring-IDE?
I am a IntelliJ user for years and do not like to use Eclipse when I want to use Spring-IDE....

Thanks,
Juergen

[Christian Dupuis]

Hi Juergen,

Spring IDE internally relies heavily on Eclipse' Plugin API and Extension Points. Such API is currently not available for Intellij in a convienent way. Following that, if you want to use Spring IDE you need to use Eclipse.

Currently we are not planning to migrate Spring IDE to Intellij. At least Intellij's Xml Editor provides some build-in content assist out-of-the box, which you shouid try out.

Sorry for that.

Cheers
Christian

[Torsten Juergeleit]

is there a really good reason to use Eclipse for the Spring-IDE?
Definitely. Eclipse provides a rich infrastructure to implement tooling like Spring IDE. This tooling infrastructure is highly extensible by well defined extension points and it's very well documented (with a whole bunch of books available). And don't forget, it's open source. This makes it an invaluable source for examples for how to leverage the basic infrastructure for different kinds of extensions.

A whole bunch of commercial and non-commercial applications are built on top of Eclipse. These vendors did this decision for a good reason.

In the case of Spring IDE the reasoning was the reuse of the following basic features of the Eclipse platform:

* resource management with change listeners
* project natures with custom project nature extending the Java nature
* incremental builder support
* generic text editor support
* extensible XML editor environment
* graph editing framework for drawing / editing graphs
* problem markers associated with resources
* preferences dialog infrastructure
* properties dialog infrastructure associated with resources like projects
* decorators associated with resources
* API for accessing the Java model or it's AST

Spring IDE is deeply integrated in the Eclipse workbench. Only a few classes are reusable outside of Eclipse.

So, without the Eclipse platform Spring IDE is only a parser which reads Spring beans config files and populates a domain model. All other stuff depends on Eclipse. Ok, we can refactor the beans config validator to get rid of the dependency on Eclipse's problem marker infrastructure. All the other stuff will not work outside of Eclipse.

Cheers,
Torsten

[wpoitras]

IdeaSpring allows you to specify config sets. The one thing it can't do is a visual representation of your beans. Be nice to integrate IdeaSpring with BeanDoc.