Group Proposal, for discussion: IDE & Tooling support

[Robin Westberg]

Hi Maurizio,

This sounds like a very good idea! I’ve spent some time on helping to improve the IDE support for the OpenJDK native code, and would certainly be interested in collaboration in that area. And I agree that documenting existing alternatives would be good, it’s possible to get a quite good IDE experience for the native code already, but you have to know where to look..

Best regards,
Robin

> On 1 Mar 2019, at 17:28, Maurizio Cimadamore <maurizio.cimadamore at oracle.com> wrote:
> 
> (This is not a call for votes; it is just a call for discussion.)
> 
> At the last OpenJDK Committer Workshop in Brussels, we agreed to set up some channel in which to discuss issues related to OpenJDK tooling, and, more specifically IDE support. We already have pretty comprehensive support for OpenJDK development in both IntelliJ and Netbeans, but the main, long standing problem has been one of lack of adequate communication and coordination between these various efforts, which often led (frustrated) developers to the path of "I'll write my own support".
> 
> The goal of this group is, first and foremost, to extensively document the alternatives that are already available at present, as well as to capture discussions related to tooling support which are currently scattered among many mailing list (compiler-dev, jtreg-dev, build-dev). After some internal discussions, it feels like proposing a group is the right thing to do because: (i) a group automatically gets a mailing list and a page on openjdk.java.net - which can be useful for communicating within the group and also for publishing the much needed documentation; also (ii) a group is not tied to any specific set of deliverables (unlike, say, an OpenJDK project), which feels right in this case, as IDE support is likely to be a recurring activity.
> 
> We want OpenJDK to be a welcoming place for developers, and I feel that improving IDE/tooling support plays a crucial role in reducing the activation energy required to start hacking on the OpenJDK codebase.
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> Cheers
> Maurizio
> 
>