Re: Integrated compiler/project support

Gili wrote:
> 1) Integrating the compiler with the IDE like Eclipse does such that
> hitting SAVE is equivilent to SAVE & COMPILE (and CLEAN if necessary)
> and its so fast that users don't notice. This should be the default
> behavior (internal compiler) and if issues arise people could always
> back out to the external compiler.

Probably the main usefulness of doing this is not to compile the file 
per se, but to show you any compilation errors... which we already do 
(as annotations in the editor), but this needs to be made more reliable, 
and probably should be displayed in the tasklist. I think such 
improvements are in the works.

> 2) Don't force projects. The reason I've used Netbeans over Eclipse
> in the past is because I never had to create projects. Sometimes you
> just want to open an editor, modify the code, recompile and quit the
> IDE; something that you can't do when you have to create a project
> first. I suggest one of two solutions: make sure a default project is
> always open when you start Netbeans *or* auto-generate projects
> around source-code files like VC++ 7.1 does.

And what classpath should the source file be compiled with? And where 
should it be compiled to? And which compiler flags (e.g. -source 1.4) 
should be used? The IDE cannot really guess these things. Or rather it 
*can* guess but the guess will be wrong so frequently as to make the 
feature not that useful.

Creating a project is just a way of notifying the IDE that the following 
set of sources should be handled in a particular way, and providing some 
kind of structure for them. I don't see any straightforward way around that.

Note that you can still open a source file that is not part of any 
project, and edit it with syntax coloring. But you will not be able to 
compile not, nor will code completion etc. necessarily work.

In NB 3.x you have to mount a package root before you can work with a 
Java file seriously. This is akin to setting up a project, but in a 
crude way that gives the IDE only a fraction of the information it 
really needs to work with the file properly.

> Lastly, when I first tested dev builds of the projects support in
> Netbeans one thing that struck me is that it is completely
> non-intuitive that I must create a project before mounting
> directories. [...]

There is no mounting of directories in NB dev builds. What do you mean 
by this?

-J.

-- 
Jesse Glick <mailto:[email protected]> x22801
NetBeans, Open APIs  <http://www.netbeans.org/>