|
|
Choosing a JSP/Struts Plugin
Greg Nyberg's Blog |
April 4, 2005 10:51 AM
|
Comments (1)
Let's face it: JSP/Struts/Tiles development isn't rocket science, but it isn't Powerbuilder, either. There are a lot of moving parts, and without some decent IDE support a junior-level programmer gets hopelessly lost in the maze of formbeans, validators, XML files, actions, controllers, etc. Over the next five months, I'm going to be taking a team of developers fairly new to Java, and experienced with the cushy world of mature 4GL environments, out of their comfort zone and into the dark and mysterious world of JSP & Struts programming.
Does this make you cringe?
Welcome to the real world of application development in the year 2005.
This brings up one of the reasons I'm so difficult to convince about the value of the latest and greatest technology: In the real world, we can't have teams comprised of nothing but 'A' players who are comfortable hacking XML in an application-context.xml file or writing custom tag libraries at the drop of a hat. Sure, the 'A' guys on a mixed team can do the hard stuff during the initial development project... But are they going to be there when you need to migrate to a new version of the GeeWiz 1.2 framework, or be willing to make significant enhancements to the application in 3-4 years? Naw, they've moved on to the NextBigThing 0.8 framework and can't be bothered with that "legacy" code. Sound familiar?
Anways, what I'm going to try with my mixed group of developers is a combination of "keeping it simple" technology-wise and the introduction of a strong IDE environment. I happen to be a fan of IntelliJ, but it is not an option in this case, so I needed to go look for a good Eclipse plugin to help with JSP & Struts development. One of the better reviews I found contrasting the MyEclipse and Nitrox plugins pretty much echos what I found: MyEclipse is cheaper, but less complete, than NitroX. Here are my observations:
| |
- Both are similar in terms of JSP syntax highlighting, support for debugging within WebLogic Server, and basic Struts configuration management.
- NitroX had a Tiles Definition browser/editor. MyEclipse promises this in Sept/Oct (see their roadmap).
- NitroX has a WYSIWYG/splitscreen editor for JSPs (and the struts-config.xml file). My read is that this is also coming in MyEclipse pretty soon (May/June).
- NitroX has a custom "perspective" that includes panes showing all variables/formbeans/etc in the scope of a JSP page (It's "AppXRay" feature inspects all your code to see what is being put on the session, request, etc.. upstream. Pretty slick). Because it has this information, the code-completion in JSP pages seems much better in NitroX. It also shows all tag libraries in a pane and has dialogs for filling in attributes.
- MyEclipse preview mode only shows the HTML in a JSP. NitroX tried to show you all components on the page, including scriptlets and tags.
- MyEclipse preview does not follow jsp:includes, so all you see is the current JSP or JSPF file. Might be a plus in some cases, I suppose, but usually you want to see everything included by your page.
- The MyEclipse Struts designer/visualizer depicts the whole struts-config file into a big scrollable pane, instead of just showing the components around and attached to the current action/jsp/etc being inspected as does NitroX. Matter of individual preference, but I prefer NitroX's approach to this.
|
Bottom line for me: The NitroX plugin is worth the extra $$$ due to the much-better code-completion features made possible by their deeper inspection ("AppXRay") of the application's code and XML files.
I'll upload the detailed writeups I did on both plugins once this blog site goes live. The URLs will be messed up if I do it now.
Comments
Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first) | Post Comment
-
What about "the detailed writeups" ?
Posted by: realgagnon on February 3, 2006 at 10:56 AM
|
|
