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Hello, I would like to know if the J2EE Standard Tools Project will be supporting visual JSP development any time soon? From some of my Google searches, it appears that WebTools will not be offering a visual JSP editor because this might collide with the interests of 3rd party vendors trying to build off of the WebTools Platform. I think the WebTools project is excellent and has the potential to become a standard for J2EE development environments, but unfortunately it appears that eclipse suffers from some of the same issues that Java/J2EE does. The idea seems to be.. provide just enough to be useful, but not enough to take it all the way. We have too many options. There are 5-10 JSP editors out there and none of them are rock solid or flexible enough to use along with WebTools. The J2EE development community would really benefit from a standard tool set that is of the highest professional quality. I thought WebTools would be the answer... I am tired of searching for the right development environment, persistence layer, web framework, appserver and so on.. The list is long and extensive. We are more then happy to go with Eclipse WebTools as our development environment of choice. It is flexible, open and of professional quality. It supports all the mayor deployment platforms and has nice debug integration. I know I am ranting a little here... but we are huge Eclipse supporters. We would like to be a one stop shop. Eclipse for almost everything (J2EE Development, Java Swing Development, Data Modeling, Testing, BART for Reporting, etc.) If the tool vendors are the reason the WebTools project is limiting its support for JSP, JSF and other related technologies, it is really too bad. In my humble opinion, the major tool providers have left much to be desired in the J2EE tools market. So much so, that it has hurt the platform adoption. If there were a free, comprehensive, flexible, robust development environment for J2EE, .Net would cease to exist. I hope the WebTools team will move forward with a comprehensive development tool in favor of the developers and not the tool providers. I bit lengthy... but just my two bits. Regards
Thanks for your viewpoint. I'm resolving this as dup just because other enhancement request is older. Your comments are relevent, though, and will be "tied" to the dup via the magic of bugzilla links. And, I will answer some of your questions here. "Any time soon?" No. ".. because this might collide with the interests of 3rd party vendors trying to build off of the WebTools Platform"? No. While we are certainly sensitive to the needs of "the eco system", we would not deliberatly "[limit] support for JSP, JSF and other related technologies". There are two simple opensource business issues that will "drive" any HTML/JSP visual editor contributions in the future. First, we do deliberately focus on supporting "spec's" and the "core staple commodities" that adapters can extend, and I think there's a rough general agreement that visual editors for HTML/JSP editors are not there yet (and maybe some question if they ever would be :). Second, to make a visual JSP/HTMLL editors that are good, reusable, and extensible is a HUGE effort. So, some Eclipse Member would need to be willing to devote substantial resources for a very long term effort, before it would be believable. Of course, if you and your company are volunteering don't let my remarks discourage you! I'm not sure what your google search found, but suspect any comments were intended in the spirit that we do not want to falsely give the impression we will have a visual editor any time soon, because unfufilled and unbelievable plans WOULD interfere with the ecosystem building on WTP. We need to be predictable and solid with what we provide. Thanks again. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 88442 ***
David summarized the situation nicely. The resources currently available for work on WTP are focusing on the building blocks at the moment. There is nothing in the WTP charter that prevents the creation of visual editors. In fact, we have some for XSD and WSDL. FYI, the JSF subproject being led by Oracle would like to create a visual editor. I think it's just a matter of resources and time. Visual editors are very labour-intensive.
This bug was moved to 'closed' state, since it is so old is is assumed its dup, invalid, or worksforme resolution is no longer in qustion and the bugzilla needs no further attention. Feel free to re-open, or open a new bug, if this semi-automatic processing was done in error in this case.
