Changing IDE = Ton Of Work

[Robert Mazur]

Whoa....so I have used JBuilder for about 4 years. I started
switching one of my projects over to Eclipse. It has about 150 JSP's
and 110 classes. This is not a huge project, but not tiny I suppose.

Wholly cow! This is quite a mass of work! The big thing is, Eclipse
forces you to lay out the project on the disc just as it appears in
the web app, whereas the two can be different in JBuilder.

So after bringing all pages/classes into Eclipse I have on huge folder
of classes, and one huge folder of JSP's. To reorganize the source
files, all the package info must change, which pretty much means
touching every JSP at minimum, and sometimes classes.

So what is my question? Uh, nothing I guess, other than wondering,
for those folks/teams that have 100's or 1000's of pages and classes
in a project, do you set aside a month(s) or something just to switch
IDE's?

Rob

p.s. I am not faulting either IDE, just noting the situation.

 

[Liz]

Whoa....so I have used JBuilder for about 4 years. I started
switching one of my projects over to Eclipse. It has about 150 JSP's
and 110 classes. This is not a huge project, but not tiny I suppose.

Wholly cow! This is quite a mass of work! The big thing is, Eclipse
forces you to lay out the project on the disc just as it appears in
the web app, whereas the two can be different in JBuilder.

So after bringing all pages/classes into Eclipse I have on huge folder
of classes, and one huge folder of JSP's. To reorganize the source
files, all the package info must change, which pretty much means
touching every JSP at minimum, and sometimes classes.

So what is my question? Uh, nothing I guess, other than wondering,
for those folks/teams that have 100's or 1000's of pages and classes
in a project, do you set aside a month(s) or something just to switch
IDE's?

Rob

p.s. I am not faulting either IDE, just noting the situation.

 

[Liz]

Whoa....so I have used JBuilder for about 4 years. I started
switching one of my projects over to Eclipse. It has about 150 JSP's
and 110 classes. This is not a huge project, but not tiny I suppose.

Wholly cow! This is quite a mass of work! The big thing is, Eclipse
forces you to lay out the project on the disc just as it appears in
the web app, whereas the two can be different in JBuilder.

So after bringing all pages/classes into Eclipse I have on huge folder
of classes, and one huge folder of JSP's. To reorganize the source
files, all the package info must change, which pretty much means
touching every JSP at minimum, and sometimes classes.

So what is my question? Uh, nothing I guess, other than wondering,
for those folks/teams that have 100's or 1000's of pages and classes
in a project, do you set aside a month(s) or something just to switch
IDE's?

Rob

p.s. I am not faulting either IDE, just noting the situation.

Check out the 'refactor' feature, it might do most of the work.

 

[Bryce]

Whoa....so I have used JBuilder for about 4 years. I started
switching one of my projects over to Eclipse. It has about 150 JSP's
and 110 classes. This is not a huge project, but not tiny I suppose.

Wholly cow! This is quite a mass of work! The big thing is, Eclipse
forces you to lay out the project on the disc just as it appears in
the web app, whereas the two can be different in JBuilder.

No it doesn't. My src directory is outside the web root. In my src
directory I have java source, resources (such as web.xml, etc), etc.

From there I do one of two things:

1. output goes to WEB-INF/classes
or
2. Use ant task to write to exploded war file.

 

[Robert Mazur]

Check out the 'refactor' feature, it might do most of the work.

Thanks for your note.

That's true....it does a good job of changing references between classes.

But it does not touch the JSP's. So all imports ot the top of pages
need to be adjusted. And, if I want to catagorize the JSP's into
folders (opposed to one huge folder of them all), then all the hyperlink
references are needing to be changed. I guess that is the massive part.

With JBuilder, though on the disc all my JSP's were in one directory, in
the projects they were all nicely organized. After moving one JSP to a
sub-directory in the Eclipse project (and therefore on the disc), I
could have 20-30 JSP's with broken links! Yikes!

Rob

p.s. Maybe I am missing something, but I don't see a way around this.

 

[Robert Mazur]

No it doesn't. My src directory is outside the web root. In my src
directory I have java source, resources (such as web.xml, etc), etc.

From there I do one of two things:

1. output goes to WEB-INF/classes
or
2. Use ant task to write to exploded war file.

Thanks for the note Bryce.

Ok, your src directory is outside the web root. But under that, how is
your package structure? If you want to call:

food.fruits.apples

....then in your src directory (using Eclipse) you need to have this, right?:

/src
/src/food
/src/food/fruits
/src/food/breads
/src/food/meats
/src/food/fruits/apples
/src/food/fruits/oranges

This would be opposed to having this and letting the IDE handle the
project packaging:

/src/
/src/apples
/src/oranges
/src/<every_other_class>

 

[Bryce]

Thanks for the note Bryce.

Ok, your src directory is outside the web root. But under that, how is
your package structure? If you want to call:

food.fruits.apples

...then in your src directory (using Eclipse) you need to have this, right?:

/src
/src/food
/src/food/fruits
/src/food/breads
/src/food/meats
/src/food/fruits/apples
/src/food/fruits/oranges

Yes, that is how my src directory looks...

This would be opposed to having this and letting the IDE handle the
project packaging:

Yes. Does JBuilder let you do that? While I haven't used JBuilder, I
don't know of many IDE's that let you have your src files outside the
packages...

 

[Robert Mazur]

Yes, that is how my src directory looks...




Yes. Does JBuilder let you do that? While I haven't used JBuilder, I
don't know of many IDE's that let you have your src files outside the
packages...

Yes, if I understand your question correctly, I could have this layout
on the hdd:

/src/
/src/apples
/src/oranges
/src/<every_other_class>

....and be able to call:

food.fruits.apples

....because in the source file I said apples.java is part of package
food.fruits. JBuilder will build that web app (or regular app)
appropriately even though that is not the way it exists in the OS's file
system. You may get a warning, but it will let you do it.

And unfortunately I have....

I'm not saying what is right or wrong, mind you. Just merely stating
that this is going to take quite a while to transistion over the 7 or 8
apps I have to Eclipse. It might be a good "cleansing" time though I
suppose.

So I was just wondering what other folks were doing in this situation
other than just rolling up the sleeves and changing a lot of source files?

Rob

 

[Ryan Stewart]

Yes, if I understand your question correctly, I could have this layout
on the hdd:

/src/
/src/apples
/src/oranges
/src/<every_other_class>

...and be able to call:

food.fruits.apples

...because in the source file I said apples.java is part of package
food.fruits. JBuilder will build that web app (or regular app)
appropriately even though that is not the way it exists in the OS's file
system. You may get a warning, but it will let you do it.

And unfortunately I have....

I'm not saying what is right or wrong, mind you. Just merely stating
that this is going to take quite a while to transistion over the 7 or 8
apps I have to Eclipse. It might be a good "cleansing" time though I
suppose.

So I was just wondering what other folks were doing in this situation
other than just rolling up the sleeves and changing a lot of source files?

Rob

Putting .java files in their proper directory structure and using Ant to
build projects. Also, you may want to take another look at the refactor
options. Some IDEs have good refactoring, some not so good, but the better
ones will handle the kinds of things you're talking about.

 

[Liz]

is it mandatory that you change everything so drastically
or is it that you want beauty

 

[Tony Morris]

Don't develop your application to depend on the features of an IDE.
I develop with two IDEs (Intellij IDEA and IBM WSAD - based on Eclipse) and
a text editor concurrently quite often.

--
Tony Morris
(BInfTech, Cert 3 I.T.)
Software Engineer
(2003 VTR1000F)
Sun Certified Programmer for the Java 2 Platform (1.4)
Sun Certified Developer for the Java 2 Platform

 

[Robert Mazur]

is it mandatory that you change everything so drastically
or is it that you want beauty

My drive to change is that I am still using JBuilder5. I avoided
upgrades becuase I didn't want to pay Enterprise prices to build JSP
and servlets. I think they since changed their feature matrix.

I finally hit a wall when JBuilder5 can't use anything higher than (I
think) jdk1.3, and that had me in a corner. So I looked into JBuilder
X and realized that, I develop on about 3 different machines and don't
want to pay 3x for the software.

I tried Netbeans and Eclipse. Eclipse seems less cludgy, and I like
the modularity of it.....so I am transitioning one application to see
how it goes. I like the IDE....the transistion is killing me! Well,
it's not THAT bad I guess.

Rob

 

[Sudsy]

Robert Mazur wrote:

Wholly cow! This is quite a mass of work! The big thing is, Eclipse
forces you to lay out the project on the disc just as it appears in
the web app, whereas the two can be different in JBuilder.

I really don't understand this claim. I use my packaging build (ant)
to collect the various elements from my development directories and
organize them appropriately in the war and ear files. It sounds as
though you're just not using all the tools provided by Eclipse.
I would suggest running through a tutorial.

 

[Bryce]

Putting .java files in their proper directory structure and using Ant to
build projects. Also, you may want to take another look at the refactor
options. Some IDEs have good refactoring, some not so good, but the better
ones will handle the kinds of things you're talking about.

I think the refactoring my help. It probably wouldn't be too difficult
to write a small app to read each java file, extract the package name
in the file, validate its in the correct directory structure, and if
not, fix it...

 

[Robert Mazur]

I think the refactoring my help. It probably wouldn't be too difficult
to write a small app to read each java file, extract the package name
in the file, validate its in the correct directory structure, and if
not, fix it...

Yes. In fact I already have a little app that runs through a directory
and replaces text as instructed. Tying that to another text file that
has the source of what to change may be the ticket out of this mess!

Rob

 

[Robert Mazur]

Robert Mazur wrote:



I really don't understand this claim. I use my packaging build (ant)
to collect the various elements from my development directories and
organize them appropriately in the war and ear files. It sounds as
though you're just not using all the tools provided by Eclipse.
I would suggest running through a tutorial.

I will be using the tools provided by Eclipse. But to get my existing
projects, which I built in JBuilder, to be in a layout that Eclipse is
happy with is the time-consuming part, thus the start of my thread.

As a test, I started a brand new web app in Eclipse which I have been
working on for about 3 weeks, and all is great! My issue is
transitioning my existing projects that were not started in Eclipse to
Eclipse.

I'll fully admit that I like the layout that Eclipse runs you into, that
being the standard layout of a web app and war file. It's just that
this was not mandatory with JBuilder, thus my existing projects aren't
structured that way.

With what little I know about Ant, perhaps it would solve my issue. But
as I type this I am not Any savvy.

Rob

 

[Phillip Lord]

Robert> I will be using the tools provided by Eclipse. But to get
Robert> my existing projects, which I built in JBuilder, to be in a
Robert> layout that Eclipse is happy with is the time-consuming
Robert> part, thus the start of my thread.

Robert> As a test, I started a brand new web app in Eclipse which I
Robert> have been working on for about 3 weeks, and all is great!
Robert> My issue is transitioning my existing projects that were not
Robert> started in Eclipse to Eclipse.

Robert> I'll fully admit that I like the layout that Eclipse runs
Robert> you into, that being the standard layout of a web app and
Robert> war file. It's just that this was not mandatory with
Robert> JBuilder, thus my existing projects aren't structured that
Robert> way.

Robert> With what little I know about Ant, perhaps it would solve my
Robert> issue. But as I type this I am not Any savvy.


It would be the same issue again. You have been replying on one way of
doing things, and now you want to do it another.

I always tend to go for things such as ant, because they are small,
easy to install, and just do what they are intended to: build
projects. So if you want to move IDE's, or develop with multiple IDE's
(or share between developers with multiple IDE's) these command line
tools are essential.

But if you have been doing everything in JBuilder, you are still going
to have to re-create this with ant. Even if ant allows you to do this
without having to change your source layout, you are going to have to
write the file which supports it.

It's a problem.

Phil

 

[Liz]

Robert> I will be using the tools provided by Eclipse. But to get
Robert> my existing projects, which I built in JBuilder, to be in a
Robert> layout that Eclipse is happy with is the time-consuming
Robert> part, thus the start of my thread.

Robert> As a test, I started a brand new web app in Eclipse which I
Robert> have been working on for about 3 weeks, and all is great!
Robert> My issue is transitioning my existing projects that were not
Robert> started in Eclipse to Eclipse.

Robert> I'll fully admit that I like the layout that Eclipse runs
Robert> you into, that being the standard layout of a web app and
Robert> war file. It's just that this was not mandatory with
Robert> JBuilder, thus my existing projects aren't structured that
Robert> way.

Robert> With what little I know about Ant, perhaps it would solve my
Robert> issue. But as I type this I am not Any savvy.


It would be the same issue again. You have been replying on one way of
doing things, and now you want to do it another.

I always tend to go for things such as ant, because they are small,
easy to install, and just do what they are intended to: build
projects. So if you want to move IDE's, or develop with multiple IDE's
(or share between developers with multiple IDE's) these command line
tools are essential.

But if you have been doing everything in JBuilder, you are still going
to have to re-create this with ant. Even if ant allows you to do this
without having to change your source layout, you are going to have to
write the file which supports it.

It's a problem.

Phil

Oh I think moaning and groaning for a couple days first is more fun.

 

[Robert Mazur]

Oh I think moaning and groaning for a couple days first is more fun.

Yes, the moaning and groaning always makes things easier.

Phil, Thanks for your note. But I am not following you when you mention
I want to do things two ways. My goal is simple: move existing files
for a web app into a new IDE (my reason for switching IDE's is
separate). Eclipse does not allow the layout of the project structure
itself (the .war file structure) to be different from the way it is in
the OS's file system like my previous IDE did. Thus, source files need
to be refactored, edited, etc.

So my question is, how have other folks in the same situation handled
this editing?

That's all. Sorry if it appeared that I was trying to do two different
things. Perhaps the replies of others have lead you to believe I was
trying to do something else (for example, other folks mentioning trying
Ant for the solution).

Thanks,
Rob

 

[Phillip Lord]

Robert> Yes, the moaning and groaning always makes things easier.
Robert>

Robert> Phil, Thanks for your note. But I am not following you when
Robert> you mention I want to do things two ways. My goal is
Robert> simple: move existing files for a web app into a new IDE (my
Robert> reason for switching IDE's is separate). Eclipse does not
Robert> allow the layout of the project structure itself (the .war
Robert> file structure) to be different from the way it is in the
Robert> OS's file system like my previous IDE did. Thus, source
Robert> files need to be refactored, edited, etc.

If eclipse has ant support (which I know that it does), then I can't
sen how it can stop you from doing this. You write an ant file which
builds the appropriate WAR file structure from however you like your
OS file system.


Robert> So my question is, how have other folks in the same
Robert> situation handled this editing?

Robert> That's all. Sorry if it appeared that I was trying to do
Robert> two different things. Perhaps the replies of others have
Robert> lead you to believe I was trying to do something else (for
Robert> example, other folks mentioning trying Ant for the
Robert> solution).


One of the nice things about a language like perl (for all of its
other faults), it has got all of this stuff sorted out for you. Very
few people release perl to the world which is not packaged in a
standard way (for CPAN), and using a standard tool (perl MakeMaker in
this case). It's nice. You get some new perl, you know how to build
it, how to test it, where to find the documentation, how to run it,
and how to install it with.

With java you get none of this. It's a total pain. Switching IDE's
causes problems for the same reason. Everyone has done it their own
way, because Java does not do it in a standard way. Worse most Java
apps do it different on different OS's in an non predictable way.

This irritates me. You can tell, can't you?

Cheers

Phil