[dmiller]

First, let me say that MyEclipse is great. Overall, I haven’t used a better plugin for Eclipse.

Now the meat: I use MyEclipse primarily for its superb editors. I realize that many out there are using Struts, but in my opinion the basics such as editors are far more important than any wizard will ever be. I would much rather see bugfixes for the editors (XML and JSP) rather than for the Struts integration features. I don’t use MyEclipse because it can generate Struts views, actions, forms or because it has a fancy struts-config.xml view (actually I don’t even use Struts anymore, so these features are of no use at all to me; aside: take a look at the Spring framework). I use it because it has the best XML and JSP editors available for Eclipse. I would like to have these components working perfectly before any time is spent making wizards and other fluff. Here is a list of things that I am having problems with:

JSP syntax coloring: I have the “HTML tag” color set to blue and the “JSP taglib keyword” set to brown. However, the taglib keywords are blue until I make a change to the file, and then only the ones below the edited text are brown.

JSP 2.0 support: the new taglib *.tag files. First, the “tagdir” keyword in the taglib directive appears in red. Also code completion for *.tag taglibs is not supported. Finally, the JSP editor does not correctly syntax highlight *.tag files (when creating the tags).

XML tab width: I have my tab width set to 2 for all editors, but the XML editor always renders tabs with a width of 4 until I make a change to the file at which time the file is scrolled up till the line that I am editing is at the bottom of the editor window…very confusing and annoying. An editor should never scroll to a new location unless I tell it to. Note both problems “initial tab width of 4” and “auto-annoying-confusing scrolling”.

Editor preferences: why the different preferences layout for CSS/JSP and XML? I personally like the treeview used to edit XML preferences rather than the tabbed view for JSP prefs. At any rate, a consistent style for all editor prefs would be nice.

As for other features, I really like the app server start/stop toolbar button. But I often find myself wishing there were two start buttons: one for debug mode and one for run mode (currently I have to open the prefs and navigate to the container of choice to change the launch mode). Also, a restart button would be nice. And could there four separate toolbar buttons instead of a single button that does nothing at all (only the little arrow beside the button actually works)? It would be nice to have a button for “Start in run mode”, one for “Start in debug mode”, one for “Restart”, and one for “Stop”. Each one would have a dropdown to select the app server, but the default would be the last used server.

Thanks,
Daniel

[Riyad Kalla]

Daniel,
You are 100% right on every one of your points. Luckily what you typed out are strong driving forces for us as well and we agree that weak editors with great Wizards is just about as useless as having just the weak editors. I will forward your comments on so we have a reminder of how important this is to the users.

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