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Pain point Working on huge projects is a common task for many Java EE developers. Sooner or later the developer would fall in a situation where he or she needs to find an exact Java EE artifact by just remembering a portion of the artifact's name or description, but not the its exact location. In such situation the developer should try different methods of searching, including file search, full-text search, etc. It would be much more convenient if the IDE provides a Java EE metadata search. Solution We are all familiar with the "Open Type" and "Open Resource" index searches in the workbench and how useful they are when we try to quickly locate our files and Java classes in the huge projects we are working with. The Java EE perspective should naturally evolve these features to Java EE metadata index search, where developers can search for certain metadata in their Java EE projects. This new feature should introduce new dialog box that looks similar to the "Open Type" and "Open Resource" dialogs. There should be a hotkey combination available that enables users to quickly call the dialog. Typing a portion of the Java EE metadata name or description should filter the available Java EE artifacts and assist the user choice. Examples for Java EE metadata are: * EJB beans * Web servlets * EJB references * Security roles
As Kiril noticed there is a new Eclipse project proposed - EMF Index: http://www.eclipse.org/proposals/emf-index/ This project will certainly help to implement this feature.
Did you have a look at EMF Search?
Jan, I took a look at the EMF search project. As far as I understand this projects allows to build Search capabilities (Search dialog, and Search Results view) on top of EMF models. While integrating Java EE models in the Eclipse search capabilities could be worthy, in this enhancement we target something different. We would like to make something similar to the "Open Type" and "Open Resources" dialogs - the abilities for the user to quickly jump to a specific Java EE artifact. I think this is closer to the scope of the new EMF Index project. Do I understand the scope of the two EMF projects correctly?
EMF Index will not primarily focus UI but it will build the infrastructure to query predefined fields of EMF models and instances thereof without actually loading the resource. AFAIKS, a "Find type" dialog will be rather easy to implement on top of EMF Index. You're right that EMF Index is closer to what you are looking for than EMF Search, given your J2EE metadata is represented in Ecore.
Thank you for the clarifications. Is there any progress with the EMF Index project jumping out of the proposal stage? I've tried searching eclipse.org web site and newsgroups, but found nothing new. I am going to propose this enhancement as a Google Summer of Code 2009 project. It would be very helpful if I know the plans for EMF Index for the next months.
EMF Index status: Today, I've requested the creation review. An initial implementation using an in-memory index has been committed to the TMF/XText project. Note that this is only a first shot and expected to change drastically.
This bug was accepted as a project in the Google Summer of Code 2009! I assign it to the GSoC student Sajith Vimukthi Weerakoon
