[midPoint] MidPoint Studio my thoughts :)

[Radovan Semancik]

Hi,

Thanks for bringing this topic up. It looks like this is getting some 
interest lately. We have discussed that on recent EU-FOSSA hackathon as 
well. Therefore I guess this is an good moment to share our plans with 
the studio.

The original idea was to create midPoint plugin for Eclipse. Eclipse was 
*the* IDE for development at that time, therefore the choice was quite 
clear. We implemented a basic Eclipse plugin for midPoint. But 
unfortunately, Eclipse proved to be quite a difficult platform to work 
with. And even though Eclipse has improved in recent years, it still is 
huge burden when it comes to stability and reliability. Our Eclipse 
plugin is difficult to maintain and it might require a major rework to 
move it any further. But what is worse is that we have doubts whether 
were are going in the right direction.

Therefore we have looked elsewhere. There are NetBeans, which was my 
favorite IDE in the past. But after years of neglect NetBeans IDE seems 
to be more or less dead. Then there is IntelliJ IDEA. It is a good and 
popular IDE among Java developers. Therefore one of our colleagues 
started a prototyping work on IntelliJ plugin for midPoint. And it looks 
like this may be the way to go. Also, the discussion on EU-FOSSA 
hackaton indicated that switch to IntelliJ may be good move.

While IntelliJ IDEA is usually used in a form of a commercial product, 
there is an open source project underneath: 
https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community
Therefore it would be feasible to base MidPoint studio on IntelliJ 
community platform. This is a crucial fact, as any non-open-source 
platforms won't even be considered for this.

Which means that we will get much nicer and stable platform to build on. 
Our prototyping seems to give a very promising outlook. However, there 
are also some downsides. E.g. we will have to drop JasperReports IDE 
plugin as there is no IntelliJ version of that plugin. However, it looks 
like the future of Jasper integrated with midPoint is questionable 
anyway, therefore this may not be such a big loss after all.

Those are still just thoughts and exploratory work. No hard decisions 
were made so far. And I would like to ask for a community feedback on 
those topics. If you have any thoughts, comments or ideas please let us 
know.

-- 
Radovan Semancik
Software Architect
evolveum.com




On 10/8/19 10:01 PM, JStanczak at vinu.edu wrote:
> I like the idea of a development tool for sure. All you have posted.. 
> I'd agree with. Possible options could also be light editors like Atom 
> or VCode. PlatformIO did a good job with this. In the end I'd like to 
> see a rapid development loop for testing. Very similar to the other 
> popular frameworks like Rails, Liferay, etc...
>
> Just my thoughts. Thanks for all the hard work. :)
>
> _______________________________________________
> midPoint mailing list
> midPoint at lists.evolveum.com
> http://lists.evolveum.com/mailman/listinfo/midpoint


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