[ jEdit-devel ] ImportFixer RFC and proposal

[Carlos Q. <car...@we...>]

Hi, and thanks for the plugin, I'm looking forward to use it a lot more

> If anyone knows of a nice simple java parser that I can grab (cba to deal
> with figuring out my own grammar to plug into jacc or whatever) it would
> be good to know about. Currently I use a fairly hacky set of regular
> expressions, but it's not a scopeable situation.
I think it would be great for the development of Java-oriented plugins to
have a common, higher level parser which could be used by other plugins. I
have the experience of the one bundled with JBuilder 4 (JOT) which basically
is an advanced reflection API but can operate on both classes and Java
files. In it you can see imports, classes, methods fields and so on in a
hierarchical structure. JOT does the parsing online so it is quite easy to
add online syntax checkers and the like.

It can not only read but write java files. This allows to make very easily
all kinds of otherwise complex plugins, like the ImportFixer. We could have
one plugins which basically can parse the current file and other plugins can
communicate. I know that some of the plugins already do that so it could be
a matter of moving the code to an independent plugin and adding a public
interface.

Any comments?