[rizniz]

I bought a subscription last night to MyEclipse primarily because I wanted a good JSP editor (tag lib support, code completion, etc.). Well, I got one, except that tag library support doesn’t work because I won’t re-organize my projects’ source into the WAR file directory structure. In fact, I’m surprised that anybody is willing to do so. It’s not a good idea for a number of reasons, including:

1. It’s annoying and error-prone to manage directory structures that mix source, libraries, and build artifacts together. Source control gets harder, builds get harder (yup, I use Ant or Maven to do builds, because integration and production builds have to be scriptable).

2. A project isn’t either a web app or not. In practice, many (at my company, all) projects are a mixture of server-side code, a fat client, distributable client libraries, and one or more web applications. Trying to treat each of these as a separate project is just not practical in most cases.

All I need to fix this problem is the ability to separately specify where different types of files are (Java source, JSP source, static web content, web.xml, TLDs). It’s just fine if you want to make the current structure the default.

If supporting this flexibility for web projects is too difficult, how about at least enabling TLD detection and tag completion in non-web-projects? If the JAR is on the classpath, look for TLDs in it, even if it’s not in WEB-INF/lib. That would be a lot better than nothing.

As it stands, reorganizing my directory structure is not an option, which means that I can’t use the main feature I bought this thing for. I’m going to look at the various other features, because I’m still hoping to get my money’s worth. But you really need to do something about this.

[Riyad Kalla]

rizniz,
First we appreciate your support in purchasing MyEclipse, if during your evaluation you find that it is not providing you the functionality you need you can email subscriptions@genuitec.com and request a refund. This is not after 30-days, but rather “any time during the year”, you can ask for a refund on the 364th day of the year if you wish to.

Secondly, we are *painfully* aware of a) this shortcomming and b) where we need to go with our project support. The biggest change MyEclipse has ever gone through was the integration of WTP which took place for the 3.8.0 release, that took months to do and months more to fully test and iron out. The change to our project structure will easily be twice as large of a change, so we have to plan/position it at such a time that it is the ONLY thing we are focusing on when it does happen and have everything else in relative harmony.

That being said, the direction we are going is going to be truely flexible projects, not unlike IntelliJ where you have ‘modules’ that are configured indepenently and organized inside of projects.

So to summarize the light is at the end of the tunnel, we are all moving towards it, it is just a matter of patience from our users while we work to get there. One big strategy we need to develop as well will be migration for all our existing users from current project structure to brand new one. Based on my impressions I believe this will be one of the biggest things we tackle this year (besides new visual designer features that are rolling out soon).

[Author]

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