Currently in development is an abstraction layer for IDEs. It provides
a common interface to the most important API parts of products like
Together, JBuilder, Forte etc. Besides support for menus, projects
and so on it contains an abstract java syntax tree. The tree allows
access to source code as well as creating sourcecode.
The layer consists of the interfaces and abstract classes for IDE
add-ons on one side and plugins for supporting each IDE on the other side.
Thus developers need only to develop for jIDEAL one time instead
of customizing their tools for every IDE they want to support.
There is also a reference plugin allowing parsing and generating
Java classes without IDE based on a javacc-generated parser.
The current development version is just a prototype and is not
intended to be run. Due to the many mails I received asking for
early access, I made the current snapshot available as JIDEAL 0.1.
I would be happy if we can set up a project on Sourceforge with
several developers since this project will require a significant
amount of work before it has production quality.
© 2001 A. Heilwagen