JDEEP Eclipse Plugin

If you like the plugin and you want to help us to improve it, there are many things that you can do to give us a well appreciated contribution.
If you’re not interested in writing code, you can give us feedbacks explaining your opinions and suggesting new features for JDEEP. You can leave a comment on our website, in the forum section, or even in the mailing list. If you find a bug, please tell us in the bug tracker section.
But we’re also looking for developers that would like to help us to improve the plugin. There’s a lot of work to do. Here it is a little TODO list with the main improvement (with higher priority) on which we’re working:

• A listener that catches the keyboard press, to be sure that a user’s really working on Eclipse;
• Implement a menù action that recall the stored data (using the XML reader) and that it shows the collected information to the user in a suitable way (we’re thinking about showing it on a jdeepView with a tree table, or, more interesting in a some kind of diagram)
• To develop the report of all the data, that it could be send on a remote database via FTP
• To make the plugin more robust and reliable;
• Any your suggestion…

If you’re interested in the source code, you can also find technical information on documentation section of SF.

We’ve updated the first build of JDEEP, adding a new functionality. Now, when you close Eclipse, the local file is added to a global file (memorized in the same directory of the local) which stored all the times related to all the projects active on Eclipse workspace.

To do this we added a control when Eclipse is starting which creates a global xml file if it doesn’t exist and a new class which implements the merge operation during Eclipse stops. This aggregator reads the global file and memorize it using DOM (from org.w3c.dom.*) methods (and we add a new vector of timeItem to keep track of the various istances) and then it reads the local file, adds the timeItem and rewrites the structure memorized in the global file.

The global file will be useful to create the reports for the users.

We’re preparing a TO DO list with the improvement to be done, for example:

• A listener which captures the keyboard interrupts to monitore that the user is working effectively;
• A view which calls the method “Reader” and shows the content of the local or global file.

We’re working hard on this plugin and any suggestion is welcomed.

We’ve published the first build of JDEEP. There are still incomplete feature that we’re planning to add in the next weeks. We remember you that you can find the project plan of the plugin at this link. The source is available in the CVS repository on sourceforge.

A brief log of this build:

The plugin start to monitor the opened editor on eclipse session and measure the time you spent editing a file.
When you close eclipse JDEEP print an xml file in the directory .Jdeep/ on the workspace. The xml file contains statistical information collected during your last eclipse session. It show information about:

• the file on which you have worked
• your username
• the total worked time for each file (in seconds)
• the date
• the project in which the file resides

There’s a lot of work to do to improve JDEEP. In the next day we’ll publish a detailed TODO list and also a documentation of the plugin. We would appreciate if you take a look at the source code and give us feedbacks. Also any suggestion is welcomed.