Where Can I Find Documentation on JSDT

[machineghost]

So I went to Eclipse developer day, got all excited about the new
Eclipse JavaScript editor (JSDT), started trying to use it and ...
discovered that major parts of it don't work (or work very non-
intuitively) and that it has virtually no documentation whatsoever.

The best documentation I could find was an IBM DeveloperWorks article
previewing JSDT and this:
http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/ATF/JSDT

Neither contained any explanation of how the whole library/global
scope thing works. Furthermore, despite Eclipse being one of (if not
the) most popular IDEs out there, and despite there being 1,001
JavaScript frameworks out there, I couldn't find a single tutorial or
walk through or anything else describing how to use ANY of framework
with JSDT.

Am I just really bad at Googling today, or is JSDT a joke (on me) that
isn't even close to being "ready for prime time"?

Honest question (well, that very last part's a bit flame-bait-ish, but
the rest is a sincere inquiry).

[machineghost]

I just wanted to post back for anyone who comes across this thread.
Considering the fact that I've now spent close to an hour just trying
to find JSDT documentation, and given the fact that this post has been
up for several days with no response, I think it is safe to say that
JSDT has no documentation whatsoever (beyond the extreme basics
provided on the Eclipse wiki).

But, there is hope for JS development in Eclipse. First, there's
Fireclipse, which is extremely cool in that it attempts to build on
the work of Firebug (as opposed to JSDT, which tries to "reinvent the
wheel" by basically re-building Firebug inside Eclipse).
Unfortunately however, Fireclipse is even less "primetime ready" than
JSDT: the Eclipse part of it doesn't even have a binarty (it still has
to be compiled from source) :-(

But far more importantly (for now at least) there is JSEclipse (from
Adobe). When I was at the Eclipse developers day, I got to meet the
lead developer for JSEclipse, and the guy made the very bold claim
that (paraphrasing; my memory sucks) "JSEclipse is so primitive, and
it can't do half of what JSDT can". That guy is living in a fantasy
world, and clearly has never tried using the two side-by-side; if
anything, the exact opposite is true.

Here's the key difference that made be abandon JSDT in favor of
Eclipse: JSDT will label any function that isn't defined in the
current file as an "error" (red squiggly underline). In other words,
if you use multiple JS files that reference each other, they will all
appear to be full of errors in JSDT. To get rid of this, you're
somehow supposed to write a ton of JSDoc (to specify variable types,
method signatures, and other things that have no place in JS), then
create a JSDT library. But there's no documentation anywhere on how
to do this.

In contrast, JSEclipse simply doesn't mark these functions as errors;
revolutionary! ;-)

(For the record, I do think JSEclipse might have a similar library
mechanism, and it may be just as un-documented; however, never having
need to use it, I wouldn't know.)

You can get JSEclipse by adding this update site in Eclipse:
http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/jseclipse/autoinstall/

I've also heard many positive things about an extensions called (I
think) Aptana, but I haven't played with it (or if I did, it was a
long time ago and it wasn't very impressive back then), so I can't
really speak to it.

Jeremy

[coryb891]

Documentation would be nice...

[Robert Mark Bram]

I want so much to be able to use this functionality, but like Jeremy
said, there is no documentation so I cannot figure out how to get
anything to work.

I posted a bug for this recently.
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=247593

Here is some code that should work..

var tableBody = document.getElementById("optionsTable").lastChild;
var rows = tableBody.getElementsByTagName("TR");

I get this error for tableBody:
The function getElementsByTagName(String) is undefined for the type
Node

So, how do I tell JSDT that tableBody is an element rather than a
node?

I heard about this on Java Posse and it really got me excited - if
only I could work out how to use it.

Rob
:)

[Abel Muiño Vizcaino]

This group is dedicated to the Q for Eclipse (q4e) maven integration into eclipse, you should post your questions to the JSDT group instead.

--

Abel Muiño Vizcaino - http://ramblingabout.wordpress.com