During the last months, while developing TestNG, I have read and also received lots of comments about the lack of support for TestNG in the most used IDEs (Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA and NetBeans). I have put some of my spare time into developing a plugin for Eclipse (by the way it is working great, and the features are quite nice [blink/]). I've had intentions to do the same for Idea, but I cannot see how I can develop a plugin with the Plugin Development Package.
Why? That 14Megs download contains 45Megs javadocs, which are mostly empty. I don't have any document describing which way to go. And those 6 examples are little toys. While the Eclipse API is really huge, I was able to find valid javadoc comments, lots of examples and even some good books (not to mention the fact that developing with Eclipse means learning SWT/JFace). I also know about the support site, but I usually go to this kind of places to ask important/specific questions, and not <<Please help...>> ones.
I keep my interest open to support TestNG in Idea, but for the moment this seems to me quite impossible.
Disclaimer: this post is by no means meant to upset IntelliJ IDEA's developers. It is only my short experience while trying to develop a plugin.
About me: Software architect, Web Aficionado, Cloud Computing Fanboy, Geek Entrepreneur, Speaker, Co-founder and CTO of InfoQ.com, Writing also about NoSQL on the myNoSQL blog
2 comments:
I've experienced similar pain when trying to develop a plugin for WebWork. It's unfortunate, because IDEA is such a good IDE. We (OpenSymphony) will just need to keep fighting the good fight and get JetBrains to provide us more info.
It's damn annoying that the plugin documentation for Idea is practically non-existent. I'm sure there are plenty of potential plugins for Idea that never got off the ground because people found it too hard to figure out how to write them. About the best you can do it try and read the source god of other develoeprs plugins.
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