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20031231 Wednesday December 31, 2003

Jalopy source code formatter no longer free I love the Jalopy Source Code Formatter. I hope it continues to be developed on SF (though it hasn't had a release in over a year). My issue? It doesn't work on Eclipse 3.0 Mx on OS X. Why am I worried development will stop? Because the original author has a non-free version (at www.triemax.com).

I can't blame the guy - developing Open Source projects is fun, supporting them is a pain. You get rewards for developing: personal milestones, discovery, knowledge enhancement. For supporting, you get to use your precious non-paid hours to try to disseminate your knowledge. This can also be rewarding, it's just not as immediate, leading to the frustration and pain of support. Good documentation reduces support, but that's a pain too.

We have test-first methodologies, will we ever get to document-first? Write the help files, then write the tests, and then the actual code. I'm willing to bet you'd get even higher quality software going this route. Posted in Java at Dec 31 2003, 08:49:54 AM MST 4 Comments

Comments:

Jalopy is a nice tool. As Eclipse 2.x didn't have a very flexible and sophisticated source code formatter Jalpoy was a must have plugin. But Eclipse 3.0 is going to have a very flexible and powerful formatter that can replace Jalpoy with no problems, I think. However, I really liked Jalopy a lot specially for use as an Ant task to format the whole project source tree when I was at the command prompt or in some other situations. BTW - Happy new snowy year :)

Posted by Behrang Saeedzadeh on December 31, 2003 at 01:39 PM MST #

You might want to take a look at Jacobe (http://www.tiobe.com/) for processing a whole source tree. I haven't used this personally but I have friends who like it.

Posted by Peter White on December 31, 2003 at 05:18 PM MST #

Saw this at http://eclipse-plugins.2y.net/eclipse/plugin_comments.jsp?id=44.
<quote>
You need to add these lines in plugin.xml under the node <requires> to run jalopy with Eclipse 3.0M5 . I don't know why, but now it works:
<import plugin="org.eclipse.jdt.ui" optional="true"/>
<import plugin="org.eclipse.pde" optional="true"/>
<import plugin="org.eclipse.jface.text"/>

Rufus
</quote>
Don't know if it works.

Posted by Mike Wall on January 01, 2004 at 01:35 PM MST #

We used to do document first approach aside from test first development, well, it worked up to a point where the business people want better value for money which made us decide to cut the document first approach. We still document though, only most of it at the end of the development. The pain in the neck with document first is when some business logic needs to be changed (we do XP | Agile), the documentation needs somehow to be changed. And this becomes too repetitive and annoying as hell.

Posted by Harod Ruthgar on January 04, 2004 at 02:13 AM MST #

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Matt Raible is a Web Architecture Consultant specializing in open source frameworks.
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