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?)