Next versions of popular IDEs (Netbeans and Eclipse)

Engines, Libraries and Tools Tools Discussion
#1

After seeing this ( http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/roumen?entry=flash_demo_2_way_uml ) I have to say that Netbeans has taken a huge step forward.
I believe that incorporating UML into your IDE will make some of Eclipse’s more time saving features useless given the fact that you will become an instant design oriented programmer.
The reason many of us don’t use UML too much other than for getting ideas for a design is because of how troublesome it is to juggle 2 seperate windows and generate your classes into your project.

Even if you do set it up appropriately then you still have to deal with the fact that there aren’t all that many powerful features in your UML editor so it’s very difficult to incorporate design with implementation.
If Netbeans changes this I will definitely swap IDEs, however seeing the demo has also given me hope that when the final version of the upcoming Netbeans is released, I will be able to chug out a complex design in minutes which would normally take an hour. Of course I am assuming that the UML editor/designer will have powerful features to begin with, also the ability to disable auto-getter/setter generation with attributes.

I ask what do you guys think about Sun’s move with Netbeans?
I think it’s a very smart move.

#2

I’m actually using 5.5 and i have to admit that the UML features are fantastic. It’s not as user friendly as Poseidon, but it’s definitively not a problem.
However, when developing, i close the UML project as it slows down work process (you can feel pauses all the time when it’s synchronizing data between model and code). I guess there is a customizable delay somewhere… Changing it might help.

Refactoring from the UML is nice too, but lacks some uesability too. Sometimes, it come asking you answers to some questions, but does not give you complete description about implementation of methods from a source class, which can lead to some panic (no “do nothing button” )

Other than that, it works like a charm and is really powerful.

#3

I got all excited that a real breakthrough had happened then I read:

[quote=“pepe,post:2,topic:27563”]
I consider Poseidon a useless tool. You could waste hours fiddling with it when you could be accomplishing something. If NetBeans is worse then I will never use it.

I will have to check it for myself (currently NetBeans 5.5 is so buggy on Mac that it can’t really be used).

If they have managed to find a way to keep all the trivial classes that you don’t want ot know about out of the way and off the diagrams… in some way that doesn’t require hours of fiddling… and if the UML & source are always in sync with out ever having to press even a single key to sync them… and if it gets to the point that I could write almost my entire program by drawing the UML then fleshing out some methods in the source editor… only then will UML be worth anything at all to me. Otherwise it is a distraction that simply sucks away time I could be using to get work done. On much larger projects with much larger teams working on the same code, things could work differently… but so far I have never seen a UML tool that wasn’t a significantly negative factor in terms of doing any real development… pen and paper have been far more efficient thus far. (And to think some companies think we should pay for that decreased productivity :))

Ok, UML rant over :slight_smile: … There are a lot of ways that IDEs can be improved to help me visualize my code and develop faster… things like call trees that I use in Eclipse all the time could be dynamically updated and available ‘live’ all the time… they could be combined with fancy combinations of source blocks and diagrams to visualize program flow… imagine if the source editor window was actually a synamic flow-chart… where links between functional blocks could be easily followed because linked blocks would be shown adjacent to each other regardless of where they were in you source files… and you could "zoom " in and out such that the blocks of code that are floating beside each other can contain different sized units … based on the nesting of code blocks " { … } "

Yep… lots of room for improvements in the IDEs… I look forward to seeing what the next versions offer.

#4

I agree wholeheartedly with Scott… it works for database designs but just totally falls flat when it comes to designing code, taking many times longer to achieve the same result.

I still think that the single most effective thing that could be done in IDEs now is to have a really proper think about GUI designers.

And if anyone ever creates the equivalent of Powerbuilder’s DataWindow in pure Java, I’m there.

Cas :slight_smile:

#5

It is worse in the way that you have to go to the palette all the time to act on your graph, while Poseidon has a better GUI. That’s all. Other than that, i find it better as it has much more powerful options.

You put the classes you want in your diagrams. So if there are classes you don’t want to see there, just remove them from the diagram (but not from the model)
Everything is always synched, which is why it sometimes lags a bit.
You can make much everything in the diagram, then fill the methods. I did it and it works fine.

I don’t agree with your vision of the usefulness of ULM. when you are designing something with more people than you alone, ‘fiddling’ an uml graph is much faster and cleaner than using paper and eraser. Moreover, once everyone agrees, you can immediatly start coding as all classes are ready to be filled. Also, explaining a lib or the architecture of your code is much easier with an UML graph than with code or abstract explaination. But as always, YMMV…

#6

When you double click on a method/behaviour on the UML diagram does it take you to the method so you can edit it, if it does can you use a shortcut to go back to the diagram you were just editing?

#7

Double clicking the method/property on the diagram edits it. Good thing is that it refactors automatically your projects and all that depend on it if you change the name/types.
You can ‘navigate to source’ any element of the diagram, but it takes a right click and a small visit to a contextual menu. I found no way to associate a shortcut to that operation. I agree that it would be useful.
Navigating back is just a matter of clicking on the uml tab. Unfortunatly, the navigation shortcut don’t work to jump back to the right diagram, they only work to jump from one source to an other.
I’ll submit RFEs to the uml project.

#8

So are they tranforming NetBeans into Sun One Studio? What’s next, synchronized file editing over the network? If the Netbeans UML editor is a separate download like the profiler, then it’s a good thing. But if they are packing it along with the main distribution, I would say they need to rethink it.

#9

The UML editor bit is part of a larger seperate ‘enterprise’ download that has loads of well enterprise stuff in :slight_smile: (xml tools, a app server etc) http://www.netbeans.org/products/enterprise/

Dan.