A good JSP editor 34

Posted by wsargent Sat, 05 Feb 2005 20:53:00 GMT

This is the story of how I found a good JSP editor.

Code completion is the killer feature for me. It’s the reason I moved from Emacs to JBuilder, and from JBuilder to Eclipse. Code completion means less syntax to think about, and more attention to devote to code. So it came as a shock when I started putting JSP together and found out that ‘ctrl-space’ didn’t do anything in Eclipse.

I had a list of specific features though:

Must support custom tag libraries.
Must complete tags and attributes of tags.
Must support embedded Java syntax.
Must complete methods and recognize Java classes inside <% %>.
Must validate Java expressions for syntax and missing variables.
Must not crash, hang or install crap onto IDE.

Not too complicated, right? I want a JSP editor and just a JSP editor. No autodeployed J2EE applications. No fancy GUI. No “debug on the fly” feature. In short, no crap.

My first try was Lomboz. It didn’t say anything about tag completion. It wanted me to install EMT and SDO 2.1.0. There’s no release build of SDO 2.1.0, so I had to use an integration build. This did not inspire confidence. I installed it. It didn’t recognize my tags. This is because the JSP editor didn’t recognize ATG 7.0 as a valid editor. There was no way to add a new application server, no way to add custom tag libraries to a project (rather than an app server). Finally, I using some embedded Java, and tried some code completion. It froze Eclipse for a couple of seconds before doing… nothing. I deleted it.

My second try was Sysdeo. People said nice things about this, but it was obviously Tomcat specific, and it said nothing about tag completion. I passed over it.

My third try was MyEclipse. I didn’t have very high hopes from the website, but I installed it and played with the JSP editor. I remember that it sort of worked. Unfortunately, it also installed a ton of other plugins, none of which I really wanted. These plugins clogged Eclipse up with useless bells and whistles. I deleted it.

My fourth try was IBM Webtools. I’d heard about this piece of code through comments in passing, but I’d never actually seen anyone say they’d used it themselves. I tried to download the code and found it depended on several other libraries. I tried to install those libraries and found more dependencies. I tried with the libraries I had and crashed Eclipse several times. I reinstalled Eclipse and decided to try something else.

My fifth try was NitroX. After all the previous tools, I was burnt. I really didn’t want to install another Eclipse plugin, and it showed in my reaction to the NitroX webpage. Big, slogan-heavy, and with massive images perfect for the under-5 set. I had a hard time finding out the JSP features in the editor. (Looking back now, the website has improved dramatically since the first time I saw it. There’s a direct link to the feature list, and more text.) The JSP editor looked like it would do exactly what I wanted, even down to validating EL expressions. But the visual editor was not a turn on, it was an 80MB download, and I just couldn’t face the idea of trying to get it to work and ending up with a ton of useless semi-working features that took up memory and CPU in my IDE. This was entirely my failing, and you can download the JSP editor free here and try it out yourself. (“Free” in this context means that the enhanced features are on a 15 day eval license.)

The next day, I decided that my problem was Eclipse. I started looking at standalone JSP editors. Because I wanted deep understanding of Java, I really needed something that was IDE like… but not tied to my regular IDE. So I skipped over JSF Studio.

I tried IntelliJ IDEA and fell in love. It supported every feature I’d asked for, was around the same price as NitroX, and wasn’t Eclipse. Setting up ATG Dynamo was simple and painfree, and it understood a JSP page was actually code and complained if I did something that would break a page compile. I decided to see what Hani was fapping about and bought the thing.

So far IDEA makes a perfect JSP editor. The only thing I can complain about is that it doesn’t understand EL expressions, and even that is only a minor niggle. My experience using IDEA as an IDE is another story altogether, and will be told another time.

P.S. I know that I’ve probably missed some editors and given short shrift to others. In particular, I missed XMLSpy and Stylus Studio. These would probably make good solutions for front-end developers who don’t care so much about the code.

EDIT: More reviews (tending towards JSF) on eclipsetips.com.

Comments

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  1. SammyRulez about 2 hours later:

    Same path, same result… :-)

  2. Tugdual Grall 1 day later:

    Have you tried Oracle JDeveloper 10.1.3 ?
    http://otn.oracle.com/products/jdev

  3. Will Sargent 1 day later:

    I have a hard time connecting ‘Oracle’ with ‘Java’ even, despite their bundling of Orion. I don’t really think of Oracle for a JSP editor.

  4. Aur?lien 1 day later:
    • Must support embedded Java syntax.
      - Must complete methods and recognize Java classes inside <% %>.
      Why on earth would you want to put java code into your jsp??
      WSAD jsp editor is pretty good, unfortunatly it comes with a bunch of unusefull plugins.
      Hopefully Eclipse Web Tools Platform (http://eclipse.org/webtools/index.html) will be an answer…
  5. Will Sargent 2 days later:

    It’s a long story, but basically I need to do things like <%= atg.servlet.ServletUtil.getDynamoRequest(request).getRequestURI() %> at various points.

  6. Rob Clevenger 2 days later:

    You may not thing of Oracle for a JSP editor, however JDeveloper does a good job as a JSP editor. You should check it out.

  7. Carlos 3 days later:

    A couple of comments. The express download for NitroX is 42MB and that includes 10MB of extra examples/docs. That should be under 5minutes for a DSL line. The visual editor for JSP is optional. On or off or simultanous views. BTW, nice coverage on many of the tools and like you said, the NitroX JSP Editor is free. ;-) The debugger is quite good too…

  8. Elba 4 days later:

    Try out Netbeans . It has a jsp editor included with all the features you require. It just has to be in a web project (the web structure).

  9. az 4 days later:

    The IntelliJ IDEA is number one

  10. Anonymous 4 days later:

    The IntelliJ IDEA is number one

  11. Alex 4 days later:

    Try Eclipse4Web

  12. Rajendra Alapaty 4 days later:

    Thanks for sharing your experiences of evaluating various jsp editors in this blog entry.

    I found lot of your blog entries very useful, especially
    the entires in ATG section.

    I also tried NitroX JSP editor plugin for JSP. Here
    I want to share my findings with you all,
    - It has all the features you’ve mentioned above.
    - Now they are giving a free license to the this pluginfor limited time.

    For any one more interested to know here is the link
    http://www.eclipseplugincentral.com/News+article-sid-340-topic-11.html


  13. Anonymous 4 days later:

    Cheese is free in the mouse trap. However, it is a limited time offer :-)

    Only lomboz is free forever!

  14. andi 5 days later:

    if you can’t afford IDEA try Gel: http://www.gexperts.com/ .
    The Java Part is nothing special but for JSP it can handle Java, HTMl and Taglibs.

  15. Carlos 12 days later:

    Cheese is free in a mousetrap?
    Actually, the license does not expire. You get it, it’s yours. The offer to allow a free download, however, is not forever…

  16. santhosh 13 days later:

    I have the same problem trying diff editors finally i’m using GEL it recognize custom taglibs and code completion only problem was it doesn’t has automatic error detection like other ide’s like eclipse. If u want to have another go at jsp editor u can try JBOSS IDE from www.jboss.org&#8230;Netbeans is excellant the jsp editor works very well with custom tags.. try it…

  17. pavel 18 days later:

    I tried to follow your path, but I ended as happy user of JDeveloper instead. Works much smoother compared to Eclipse, offers decent JSP editor with autocompletion and has nice price tag compared to Idea.

  18. pavel 22 days later:

    I tried to follow your path, but I ended as happy user of JDeveloper instead. Works much smoother compared to Eclipse, offers decent JSP editor with autocompletion and has nice price tag compared to Idea.

  19. jan about 1 month later:

    Followed the same path, but reached different ending :-) That is, keep JSPs to the minimum, put everything in servlets.

  20. Anonymous about 1 month later:

    i’m just starting to use jsp.. can any one tell me which is a good jsp editor pls

  21. Seth about 1 month later:

    I was googling for an (or rather, another) eclipse plugin when I stumbled here. I went through half of your list and ended up with…the default text editor in eclipse. =/

    Guess there isn’t a half decent JSP editor out there…and I wasn’t the only one who found out the hard way.

  22. crimson 2 months later:

    NetBeans 4.0 is awesome. Moreover it`s free and opensource.

  23. Mad 2 months later:

    All you guys who get Idea working with tag libraries - I can’t get it to do code completion with JSP tags and I find the documentation befuddling. Do you put the JSP config stuff in web-xml or not? And do you have to extract the tld files from e.g. standard.jar? HELP!

  24. Murthy 4 months later:

    Try netbeans. Its free.

  25. YouAreSoRight 4 months later:

    After trying out exactly the same editors I can understand you so much. Why is there no good JSP editor for eclipse that does not come bundled with a lot of other stuff we don’t need?

  26. Jordihs 4 months later:

    JBossIDE also comes with a half-decent JSP editor (kinda work.in progress). It does basic syntax coloring and the like. It still looks kinda work-in-progress but it’s not mentioned here and is a worthy choice if you don’t need advanced features

  27. jordihs 4 months later:

    Just tried nitrox. My impression: slow unfriendly crap!

  28. alx 4 months later:

    Try visualjsp it has good ide graphics

  29. skroah 9 months later:

    Here we are in November and it’s still pretty much the same story. Webtools final comes out in a few weeks for 3.1 and I really hope it works. I really can’t stomach firing up another editor to write jsps.

  30. Daniel 11 months later:

    Try EclipseHTML. It’s a subproject of Amatera (as far as i could read). It does java code completion inside scriptlets and tag completion for taglibs.

    See http://amateraside.dev.java.net Version 1.6.9 is 3 days old and a 2.5 MB download.

    It works for me.

  31. Dr Sog almost 4 years later:

    Whats a JSP for - Presentation.

    Curse those who put code in a JSP. Thats what an Object is for.

    A JSP editor should be WYSIWYG. Youre idea of perfect is flawed

  32. ben over 4 years later:

    Not that flawed. For a freelance web developer. Who should stand as both Designer and Developer. WYSIWYG thing is an important criteria.

  33. Rick O'Shay over 4 years later:

    Not understanding EL means not being able to drill down on objects with code-completion on EL expressions. That translates to a useless JSP editor.

  34. Avatar
    Prameela over 5 years later:

    You are probably correct. Eclipse + decent JSP editor seems to be asking for too much. I am still stuck with the text editor :(

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