David White's Jindent Addin For JBuilder
Jindent is a tool you can use to
reformat
java source files so that they conform to a known standard. When I
began
using Jindent the tool was at revision 2.1 and was made available
without
charge. This tool proved so useful that I just had to
incorporate
easy access to it from within JBuilder! Initially, I tried to do so via
the user-configurable Tools menu in the IDE. This worked but was slow
and
unpredictable because JBuilder does not save files to disk prior to
executing
a Tools menu item. This meant that recent changes were not always
flushed
to disk prior to running Jindent. In addition, this proved to be a slow
process as another virtual machine had to be started each time.
This addin solves the problems I was having trying to use the Tools
menu approach. Now, running Jindent is easy to do. Typically, the addin
does not execute Jindent against disk files. Instead, it passes
JBuilder's
editor buffer to Jindent directly. Using these techniques, the
operation
is faster and un-doable in JBuilder's IDE. Also, no additional virtual
machine is required.
As of this writing, versions 3.0, 3.1, 3.11, 3.2, 3.21, 3.22, 3.23,
and 3.5
of Jindent have been released. While these greatly enhanced versions of
Jindent are no longer free of charge, limited function trial editions
are
available. At its modest cost, the standard edition of Jinent seems to
me a real bargin.
The new version (2.50) of my JindentAddin supports ALL
released
versions of Jindent and is available on the download page. New features
include:
- Support for changes made to the OpenTools API in JBuilderX which
were not compatible with previous versions of this addin. Note that
while this version of the addin requires JBuilderX (and possibly above)
for compilation, it remains backwards compatible with previous versions
of JBuilder (at least it still runs on the copy of Version 3.5 that I
have on my system).
As the addin is distributed under the GNU
LGPL, source code is included in the distribution .jar file. Also
in
the .jar file you will find a readme file with more details about the
addin
and how to install/configure it.
Download Page