Hi Javier,

I just wanted to alert you and other JDEE users and contributors to
some plans I have for jde-open-source and get your comments. First,
the JDEE has now accumulated a number of commands that "jump" the user
to the source of the class that defines the symbol at point in the
current buffer. Some of these commands now live on the Help and Find
menus. Others are not bound to any menus. I'd like to group these
commands together and give them more visibility in the JDEE user
interface.  So my plan is to create a new JDEE toplevel menu called
Goto that contains the following commands.

Goto
  Symbol Definition  (formerly jde-open-source)
  Super class
  Interface

The menu would appear below the JDEE's Find menu, which finds
occurences of expressions.

I plan to put all the JDEE's "goto" commands and supporting functions
in a new jde-goto.el package.  I have already created this package and
include the jde-open-source commands in it. I plan to commit the new
package to CVS shortly. After doing this, I plan to delete
jde-open-source.el from CVS to avoid confusion. The new package
renames jde-open-source as jde-goto-def.

Regarding jde-goto-def, I appreciate the work that you have done to
reduce its dependency on jde-complete.  I'd like to take your work a
step futher and eliminate any dependency. To do this, I plan to create
a new Lisp package, named jde-ci, and a corresponding Java utility
class, named jde.util.ClassInfo, devoted to using Java reflection to
get information about a class. This class would incorporate and
abstract the "class info" code in jde-complete.el and
jde.util.Completion. This would allow us to eliminate jde-goto-def's
dependency on jde-complete.el. Ultimately, I envision the Class Info
package serving as a resource for both goto and completion commands
and any other JDEE command that needs to get information about a
particular class's field, methods, exceptions, etc.

Finally, I do not think that jde-goto-def goes far enough in its
present shape. Presently, it jumps the user to the first occurence in
the source file of the symbol whose definition the user wants. This
may or may not be the actual definition of the symbol of interest. The
actual definition may be further down in the source file. The problem
is that jde-goto-def knows only the name of the symbol of interest. To
find its definition, jde-goto-def needs to determine the type and, in
the case of methods, the signature of the symbol of interest.  I'd
like to see jde-goto-def enhanced to do this.

Regards,

Paul

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