Bedework and IDEs

IDE or no IDE

It's probable we can all claim to some favored development environment and code layout. The bedework projects have taken the shape they have over a period of time and there are a number of basic criteria which govern they way it is organized.

No ancillery tools required

We try not to require that any framework be installed or used to maintain and develop bedework. Those who work every day in various tools usually claim they will solve all our problems but installing such a tool can be an insurmounatble obstacle, especially when the tool itself is available in incompatible versions which may or may not install succesfully on your current system. ant runs everywhere, as does hsql and tomcat. These components can be wrapped up in a quickstart which provides a complete, though many would say primitive, environment - lacking only the JDK.

If we were to recommend any ide it might be eclipse. This ide seems to happily accept almost any project layout wih more or less work. It installs easily on any system and doesn't take more than a few hours to understand enough to get going. It is happy with the project layout of bedework and together with the subversion plugin will handle updates to the system. as it happens, the structure of bedework was in no way influenced by eclipse, it just happens that eclipse will work well with it (which may be underselling the hard work of the eclipse developers).

Maintenance of structure

The layered structure of bedework is not just for the pictures we can draw, it is a standard structured approach to building large systems. Unfortunately most ides, eclipse included, do not make it easy to maintain such a layered structure, all components are visible to everything. Doing builds thjrough a build environment that enforces the structure by only making certain libraries available is a reqyirement for a clean programming model.

Thus, an approach used is to develop the code in eclipse and then build and deploy using the ant build scripts.

IDE help

Given the above we will still do our best to help install bedework within your favorite IDE. Instructions for each should be added to this list.

Eclipse