Hi,
Reading one article of Martin Fowler about tool support for refactoring
(http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/refactoringRubicon.html), I had a look at the
Xrefactory emacs-based tool( http://www.xref-tech.com/xrefactory/main.html ) and IDEA
java code editor which both have great features
(http://www.intellij.com/idea/features.jsp)
Did anybody recently tried out Xrefactory in combination with JDE?
The JDE stands very well against the list of features of those tools. I'll definitely
stick with JDE because it's so rich, but I thought that some features of IDEA were
really cool and could inspire some of us for enhancing the JDE.
Here is an extract from the IDEA features that I would dream to see in the JDE:
* ParameterInfo (brief information about the method's parameters, while the caret is
inside the brackets)
The Ctrl-P pressed anywhere inside method call parentheses brings the tooltip with
available method signatures. The current parameter is highlighted in bold. Optionally,
it pops up automatically when user types '(' or on using code completion features.
* Generation of try/catch construct for selected block
Select a block of code and invoke "Surround with try/catch". This will check for
exceptions thrown by the block and wrap the whole block into the corresponding
try/catch statement.
Harder ones would be the refactoring ones, since it would require to parse/keep a
database of which class uses of a given field/method/class:
* Renaming of packages, classes, methods, fields, method parameters and local
variables with reference correction
* "Extract Method" code refactoring
Well, I had a great dream...
Guillaume.
