RE: [ jEdit-devel ] Debugger plugin, again

[Dirk M. <dmo...@gm...>]

Hi Andreas,

> Hello,
> just a few thoughts from a spectator, 
> I hope I do not step on anyones toes but:
> I am just wondering why you are reinventing the wheel.

Oh, that's just my ego trip.  ;)

Now seriously: when I started the Debugger 8 months ago, I looked at the
JSwat architecture and found that it would be too difficult to integrate it into
jEdit. So I decided to do it by myself. This was strengthened by the fact
that I really like the JPDA and wanted to play around with it. I never thought
that I would ever get so far that the Debugger is actually usable.

Shortly after I started the project, Nathan Fiedler intensified the
development of the long idling JSwat project again, and extended the architecture to
be more flexible for IDE integration. David Taylor found that out, and
noticed that it would now be possible to integrate it into jEdit. (He had to send
some patches to JSwat I think.)

> I am very successfully using jswat together with jedit. 
> Not as plugin but as standalone debugger. It has almost as much
> functionality as other debuggers like netbeans or eclipse.
> I did not look at the jswat plugin very deep because it 
> does not allow remotedebugging yet, and 
> I did not see much benefit in
> having an integrated debugger in jedit which would make
> the memory consumption very much higher.

Not higher than when you start 2 virtual machines: one for JSwat and one for
jEdit. JDK 1.4 fixes lots of bugs in the JPDA, reduces memory consumption
and increases debugging speed drastically. Did you check it out?

Architecturally, NetBeans is just the same as
jEdit+Debugger+CodeAid+ProjectManager: an editor with an incremental parser and JPDA debugger, all in the
same virtual machine. Except that NetBeans has a much better project
management (jEdit almost non-existent) and a GUI builder. But it is much more bloated.
I always thought: jEdit can do much better than NetBeans; and given some
time, it will finally beat it.

> What I understand, is that it is very nice to have an 
> integrated debugger for the newbies which like to edit, compile 
> and debug a "hello world"-program. 

Hey, I even debugged jEdit from within jEdit! Without the Debugger, I would
never have fixed the JCompiler JDK 1.4 bug!

Ok, jEdit is still not a "big" "real-world" "company" project, but that's
how far you'll get.

> But for them I think that a gui-design-plugin would be 
> much more important.

I hate GUI builders. I tell every Java newbie to code Swing GUI's by hand.
 
> Or did I miss some very important shortcomings of jswat ?

No, JSwat is just fine, it's much better than my Debugger, especially the
Console and the conditional breakpoints. It's just... well, wrong timing at the
start. And having a pet project is fun.   ;)))

Dirk.

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