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August 16, 2004

IDE Wish List

With a previous client, I was a fervent Eclipse user/booster. Now, I'm at a client where IntelliJ is king. With a reasonable level of comfort with the two big hitting IDEs for Agile Java developers, here is the first of what could blossom into a long list of suggestions for new features for these tools...

  1. Some form of modeless notification for when a breakpoint is reached.

    Such a beastie would certainly save me a little time when I'm swearing at my browser waiting for it to render and the bottleneck is really back in the J2EE container I'm running in debug mode in my IDE which is sitting patiently at a line breakpoint waiting for me to intervene.

    This notification could be something annoying like a beep, but preferably a status bar popup (similar to those used by Yahoo Messenger) with the message "IntelliJ has halted on a breakpoint" would be sufficient.

Posted by Andy Marks at August 16, 2004 04:47 PM

Comments

I wouldn't mind that for Eclipse... I hardly ever fire up the debugger, so I'm not that used to it. Spent about 10 minutes yesterday wondering if the code had got into an infinite loop when in fact it was on a breakpoint; as the IDE was behind the browser, I didn't spot the switch to the Debug perspective.

On the modeless notifications... Firefox has a nice way of letting you know about completed downloads. Not being a Yahoo Messenger user, I don't know if it's the same, but it sounds similar: a box that appears above the status bar and then slides away.

Posted by: Robert Watkins at August 18, 2004 05:24 PM

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