JADE Environment Development Ideas

The Jade product would be more powerful and flexible if hooks were made available so that we can override or complement the Jade IDE functionality. This would allow Development teams to be more productive and produce higher quality software.

Consider having your own menu items alongside the native ones, or where existing menu items could be overridden, or custom UI components running within the IDE.

Possibly best explained by some examples of practical uses:

- At compilation time, we could warn for obsolete entities, adherence to coding standards, transient leaks, or auto run unit tests associated with the code.

- Where documentation text is added to classes and properties etc, currently all that is available is free format text. An extension could be built to generate our own template or open our own dialog for consistent capture.

- When editing methods, we could auto-insert lines or snippets of code, or even open our own editor.

- When reviewing method histories, we could open our own compare tool instead (eg. winmerge)

- Hooks for extending source control capabilities, say to one-click deploy changes or talk to 3rd party software.

- Override the object inspector to show other information (even edit capability if that?s what your Dev team needed)


Some of the above examples have been individually proposed in JEDI already, but not all will make it into the product, not all will meet the needs of individual Teams, and furthermore it will be some years before Teams can take advantage of them due to upgrade paths we?re often locked into.

For those Teams willing, the extensions could be put on GitHub or the like to share and collaborate with others. Where there is enough consistency and popularity they could go into a future release of the IDE.