Some stories from a user

(Again, apologies for lateness -- been offline)

 > Enter Maven. I use a web search engine (or built-in Eclipse feature,
 > but it's not very good) to find this:
 > http://search.maven.org/#artifactdetails|org.apache.commons|commons-lang3|3.4|jar
 > 
 > Then, I add this to my project's (existing) pom.xml:
 > 
 >     <dependency>
 >         <groupId>org.apache.commons</groupId>
 >         <artifactId>commons-lang3</artifactId>
 >         <version>3.4</version>
 >     </dependency>
 > 
 > As soon as I hit save, I can go back to CoolClass.java and hit c-SPC
 > again. It will work.


I have to agree with what you are saying about maven. Assuming JDEE goes
the route that I have suggested with a Clojure based nrepl client/server
(as opposed to beanshell) approach, there would be several ways of
achieving this.

We could supply explicit support for adding dependencies; trivially, the
nrepl server would need restarting afterwards. Even neater would be to
use a tool like pomegranate which *dynamically* extends the classpath.
This includes adding a new maven dependency (with all the downloads that
this entails, iff any).

The move away from beanshell to something better supported should mean
that more of this software comes off-the-shelf. Making Emacs support the
user interface, but being prepared to lean on Java and the JVM for this
non-editing related functionality is, I think, the way forward.

Phil

------------------------------------------------------------------------------