Now that the Eclipse dependency in the Scout runtime is gone, are there plans to support both Eclipse and IntelliJ for the SDK?

You need to do everything by yourself

Urs Beeli wrote on Mon, 07 December 2015 14:54

Now that the Eclipse dependency in the Scout runtime is gone, are there plans to support both Eclipse and IntelliJ for the SDK?

Now that running a Scout Application do not requires Equinox/OSGi we theoretically do not depend on Eclipse Tooling anymore (no PDE, no Tycho and so on).
If you take the Hello-World example: it is a plain java application, the dependencies between the modules are defined in the maven pom. I did not try it, but you should be able to start and edit it from any Java IDE.

For each feature we build with neon, we try to be IDE agnostic. Here some examples:
* FormData generation is a simple java program, that now is integrated in Eclipse IDE (when a form class changes, the FormData class needs to be regenerated) but that could be integrated elsewhere.
* If I am not mistaken, the "New Scout Application" wizard now relies on maven archetype (you could use it from the command line).
* ...

That said, having a good development experience with an IDE goes behind the runtime and the build system. My personal opinion is that "supporting IntelliJ" is again a question of sponsorship. Who is willing to invest time and/or money in Tooling for IntelliJ?
To my current knowledge BSI is evaluating how much tooling for Eclipse IDE is requested to work efficiently with the Eclipse Scout framework (first motivation is that BSI employees are efficient when they work on Scout application projects). BSI has no plan to invest in other IDE Tooling.
The important message is: the door is not closed, but someone has to invest this feature to make it happen.

1. remove the <repositories> and <pluginRepositories> elements in your parent pom
   
2. Update the <org.eclipse.scout.rt_version> property to 5.2.0.M4
   
3. Update the version of the parent maven_rt_plugin_config-master to 2.0
   

The FormData generation engine has exactly no dependency to Eclipse IDE. All the dependencies can be fetched from Maven Central.

I am not sure if we have already a headless Java program to generate them, but nothing speak against it.

As for a maven plugin to do the job: I have heard that someone tried it, but he needed to drop it because of following problem: the shared module doesn't know the client module (the FormData generation cannot be performed as part of the shared build). The client module is built after the shared module, and cannot contribute classes to the shared (which is already built). This is a kind of chicken and egg problem.

As far as I have understood it, the Gradle build system offers more flexibility in this domain. But we have not started any investigation in this area.

Any contribution (for a build tool and/or an IDE) is welcomed. Feel free to start something and to share the result with us. This is an open-source project.

* SDK code completions should allow to easily override getConfiguredXXX methods (without having to write "getConfigured[Ctrl-Space]".

* There should be an action to create a public getter for a field or column class.

=CONCATENATE("public ";A1;" get";A1;"(){ return getColumnSet().getColumnByClass(";A1;".class);}")

=CONCATENATE("public ";A1;" get";A1;"(){ return getFieldByClass(";A1;".class);}")

I forgot to write here, that with the Neon M4 release, some support for the point "1. " (New scout model inner class in existing java files) have been added to the IDE.