A good JSP environment for Eclipse?

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20020907071653

Okay, I admit, I'm an Eclipse addict. (hmm? Doesn't Roller have a spell checker?)

These days I'm doing JSP work and I realizing that there's a lot I'm missing. I downloaded the Sysdeo plugin, its actually quite good. Had to do some debugging, unfortunately it placed the generated java classes in the wrong directory, fortunately someone else wrote a fix.

Downloaded the Lomboz plugin, well its much more comprehensive than the Sysdeo one, that is it can compile and syntax check your JSP page, it has Java code completion inside the JSP editor. (Wow this looks great stuff!) Bad news, well I hate that you have to deploy the war before you can test, it doesn't have code assist for tag libraries, it doesn't work well with Sysdeo's tomcat plugin, finally its not open source, so I can't fix its problems.

Did I forget one other thing? Well, you can debug JSPs however, you can't step through the JSP like what VisualAge used to do. I asked the all knowing google and it turns out, nobody has an open source solution for debugging JSP inline.

Browsed through the .NET rags at my local Borders, realized how Microsoft may be doing it. Turns out, you subclass your code from the generated class. So you can use the regular debugger to do its trick. I'm curious, does .NET have the concept of a customizeable tag library?

I'm now going to try out the latest JDeveloper release, maybe its going to make my life much easier. I read pretty good things about the BC4J framework.

(Hmm? Doesn't Roller have a way to solicit comments?)

Last modified 2004-08-05 04:58 AM

java IDEs

Posted by Anonymous User Anonymous User at 2003-11-03 08:07 PM

Just wanted to quickly note some things that may be of use out there about the various Java tools:

Netbeans has everything including stepping through JSPs (albeit sometimes doesnt work, or only works a tad). Not sure about taglibs .. not sure about other minor things. Eclipse is still quite young in these ways .. which is fine, but has taken quite some time to get to a level of usability, and as you mention, the web plugins for development are quite lacking. Recently fired up IDEA to use at a client site .. for the 30 day trial .. looks like it would be hard to live without, so I will probably buy it. It is super intelligent and does things shockingly well .. it's only issue insofar was when I embedded some XSL and it complained that it couldn't find the taglib prefixed

Otherwise the commercial tools are all great too with varying degrees of niftiness .. but their price points are usually pretty prohibitive .. like JBuilder's $3500 price tag, and even JDeveloper which has gotten very very nice recently is still a grand to use on commercial projects.

Overall as far as free + functionality, netbeans is probably still the winner .. only thing is that you may put more money into hardware to run it than IDEA would cost :)

Lomobz/Sysdeo Plug-ins

Posted by Anonymous User Anonymous User at 2003-12-01 02:28 PM

I use both relatively seemlessly. Lomboz gives me JSP editing capabilities, while the Sysdeo plug-in manages Tomcat for me. If you're encountering a particular problem, email me at "saxman at engin.umich.edu".

Give MyEclipse IDE a try

Posted by Anonymous User Anonymous User at 2004-08-09 09:12 PM

May I suggest giving MyEclipse a try. You can try it for a 30 day trial - http://www.myeclipseide.com. No, I don't work for Genuitec. http://jason.blog.city.com. It has a nice JSP editor with syntax highlighting and code completion.