Re: Discussion About Community Contributions to NetBeans

Hey,
Sorry if the email I sent sounded negative: I've actually quite enjoyed
developing with the Netbeans platform, and found some aspects of the
development process very straightforward, well documented, and helpfully
supported by the IDE (in the form of wizards, the project view, library
searching, etc).
You're right about my list of issues being vague: sorry about that! I'll try
to clarify them now. I was more talking about my impressions of trying to
create additional IDE functionality, as opposed to creating a Netbeans
Platform app. I had relatively little trouble with the latter, and found the
numerous available Netbeans Platform books quite helpful. The modules I've
been attempting to create for the IDE have been language-level support for
GWT's custom languages, specifically JSNI (JavaScript embedded in Java
code), UiBinder (XML containing CSS, HTML and a custom expression language),
and GWT's CSS with additional features. The difficulties I've had have
mostly been with the language support frameworks (CSL, Lexer, and Parser
APIs). There is some helpful documentation available (e.g.
http://wiki.netbeans.org/How_to_create_support_for_a_new_language,
http://bits.netbeans.org/dev/javadoc/org-netbeans-modules-parsing-api/overview-summary.html),
but I found it difficult to find where to start. For example, the CSL APIs
don't seem to appear in the main API documentation (
http://bits.netbeans.org/dev/javadoc/index.html). The documentation is also
not very detailed in some areas. For example, there are multiple ways to
create embedded languages, but no documentation (at least not any that I can
find) describing the difference between the them, or how embedded languages
are highlighted/formatted/etc by the framework. I've asked a few questions
on the mailing lists about these and related issues, and only got a reply
for one of them: about a month later. The Javadocs for the Parser and Lexer
APIs have been good at higher levels, but looking through solutions to
similar problems to the ones I'm facing (e.g. embedded Java/HTML in JSPs,
embedded CSS in HTML), the code has been fairly messy, with very little
documentation.
I hope that helps to clarify my previous email. I suspect that my experience
would have been different if I'd been using different APIs: perhaps the
language-level APIs are too new to have much documentation. Thanks for being
open to discuss the issues.
Regards,
Daniel

On 5 August 2011 17:54, Geertjan Wielenga <[email protected]>wrote:

>
>
>
> Hi,
>
> What documentation is missing? What is disorganized? Which javadoc is
> minimal? Which questions are slow in getting answered or are not getting
> answered at all?
>
> Would be happy to fix these things, but need to know very specific things
> that you're referring to. For example, right now, I'd say almost everything
> has already been documented. So, there must be some difference between your
> perspective and mine -- would like clarity from you as to what is missing
> and/or incomplete.
>
> Geertjan
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: [email protected]
> To: [email protected]
> Sent: Friday, August 5, 2011 9:49:59 AM GMT +01:00 Amsterdam / Berlin /
> Bern / Rome / Stockholm / Vienna
> Subject: [nbdiscuss] Re: Discussion About Community Contributions to
> NetBeans
>
> Hi,
> A couple of barriers to my motivation/ability to contribute have been
> - The lack/disorganisation of current documentation
> - Missing/minimal javadoc
> - Slow/no response to questions on mailing lists
> I'd love to see those areas improve. Netbeans is an excellent IDE and
> development platform, and it'd be great to see it become easier to
> contribute.
> Regards,
> Daniel
>