Hello, I just happened to use IDEA for a type of task I initially assumed it would be well suited for, but came to realize it was by far was not as good at as I had hoped.
The task was to understand a pre-existing project with a reasonably complicated class hierarchy. I had before me a bunch of classes, spread over several packages, of whom I wanted to quickly understand which of them were part of inheritance hierarchies, and which implemented interfaces internal or external to the project. I found that the only tool IDEA offered which seemed to be useful for this task was the Hierarchy view - but it turned out that my initial suspicion, which I had when I first heard about it, was true - the Hierarchy view is of rather limited use, as it only shows the hierachy of one class, and you cannot have several Hierarchies open at the same time. Right now, all I can do is click through every individual class and try to somehow remember the dependencies. My suggestion is to consider whether it would make sense to add some "high-level analysis" features to IDEA instead of further extending its "low-level coding" intelligence (maybe both ;-)). What I really would have needed is a class diagram which showed the dependencies and relationships of ALL classes in my project at one glance (or two) - be it as UML icons or in any other way. In fact I am considering to get me some external tool for this (hopefully there is a free one), but I really think this should be part of the IDE, as IDEA already has all the knowledge - it would just have to present it visually.. Hooray for a Project Class Diagram!! regards, Christian Sell _______________________________________________ Eap-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.intellij.com/mailman/listinfo/eap-list
