Question: why rewrite from scratch?

NLSurfMan / tasks

IntelliJ Tasks Plugin

http://confluence.jetbrains.net/display/CONTEST/Tasks

29 stars 16 forks source link

Question: why rewrite from scratch? #34

Open lppedd opened 6 years ago

lppedd commented 6 years ago

Hi! Why are you willing to rewrite this plugin from scratch, what's your motivation?

NLSurfMan commented 6 years ago

Hi, thanks for commenting.

Here are a few reasons:

There are some design choices I don't like but that came with the inherited code. For example, the tight coupling of the Controller code with the UI and the old-skool event firing mechanism.
The UI is built for IntelliJ 9. That was a long time ago, and need updating.
The UI uses old event notification techniques. IntelliJ has better ways of doing that now.
The storage engine has changed. The serialization as it happens now is very outdated.

As you can see, almost all of the plugin is affected by the passing of time and the progress that JetBrains have made with their plugins. On top of that are some feature requests like #2, #29 and #30 that require a different approach that is hard to integrate in the current setup.

lppedd commented 6 years ago

Thanks, sounds good. What are the requirements to participate in the rewrite? I'm not an expert in IntelliJ Plugin development, but this plugin is a must have for me, and if the rewrite can bring performance and usability improvements, then I'm down to do it. Are you willing to do it in Kotlin or Java?

NLSurfMan commented 6 years ago

My experience with Kotlin is non-existent, so if the choice is mine, I'd stick to Java.

I would be happy to work with you on a rewrite, but at the moment I don't have the time to get started. Feel free to fork this repo and submit pull requests if you can improve the code.

I do realise that a lot of users like this plugin, so I won't abandon it. I just need time (or help :))

lppedd commented 6 years ago

I proposed Kotlin because of its conciseness. We are "forced" to use Java 8 for plugin development. If we write something using JDK 10 the users will need JRE 10 to run IDEA. Sure, when I'll find something I don't like I'll make a pull request (for example the editing dialog is not that great and does not accept rich text formatting). Feel free to share your ideas

alflanagan commented 5 years ago

My experience with Kotlin is non-existent, so if the choice is mine, I'd stick to Java.

FWIW, I've found switching to Kotlin to be amazingly easy, and it really reduces the ugly boilerplate you have to write. I'd encourage you to check it out. :)

svenruppert commented 5 years ago

any news here about the timeline or what happened until now?

lppedd commented 5 years ago

@svenruppert I had cloned the project and started refactoring the UI widgets to align them to the new IDEA UI (2018.3). However I didn't find the tasks panel useful for the kind of work I was doing so I stopped working on it.

svenruppert commented 5 years ago

@lppedd thx for the update.

NLSurfMan commented 4 years ago

I am currently updating the plugin to the latest Intellij Plugin platform. I will commit updates soon. Sorry to keep this project not updated all this time.