Re: [xwiki-devs] [VOTE] Create a XWiki Debug (IntelliJ) Idea project in the XWiki organization page

On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 8:55 PM, Paul Libbrecht <paul(a)hoplahup.net> wrote: I've always used Eclipse and the xwiki-debug-eclipse which has a nice property: you don't have to bother to make sure that the sources you modify (and the corresponding JARs) are available in the webapp. Eclipse (+ m2eclipse) does it for you by automatically synching every modification with the corresponding webapp. And, above all, it knows when to use a JAR coming from your repo instead of the one coming from one of your open projects. AFAIK if you don't use this kind of automation you have to manually copy JARs and make sure that the correct version is deployed. A very error prone operation involving a lot of steps, and switching back and forth from the shell. So the advantage is that: the IDE takes care and makes sure automatically that everything is synched without you touching anything. So starting an XWiki is just a matter of a click. Again, AFAIK many people were mostly using the "manual procedure". Now since I wanted to start using Idea, and because I was coming from a highly automated environmnet (Eclipse + xwiki-debug-eclipse) I simply wanted to recreate the same level of automation in this environment, not having to manually check/copy anything. So I found a way to "emulate" xwiki-debug-eclipse in IntelliJ Idea :) The init.sh with the symlinking is the best way I've found to make available to the webapp project all the files that belong to other places (i.e., xwiki-platform-web and skins). I could have duplicated these, but if you were hacking a skin you would have had to make sure that you copy back the modified files to xwiki-platform. Again an error prone situation. With symlinks this is automatic. In Eclipse we didn't need to do that because Eclipse supported symlinking at the project level. Infact there are links, but they are defined in the .project and you don't see it in the filesystem. I am no expert of IntelliJ Idea, and this is the first time I use it. So if you see something wrong in what I described please shout :) Hope this helps, Fabio