[Bluej-discuss] Two Questions

[Michael Kölling]

On 9 Jul 2007, at 06:49, Chris Share wrote:

> I've been using Blue-J as my programming scratchpad for a couple of
> years. I really like the program although it does have a couple of
> "features" that annoy me:
>
> 1. Is it possible to set breakpoints that don't vanish with each  
> compile?

No, you can't.
You can add that as a feature request to the BlueJ bug list. The  
breakpoints disappear, because break points are associated with a  
class file, and when you recompile, then the class file is thrown  
away, and a new one is generated. So the break points are gone.

Now we could try to be clever and remember where the break points  
were, and try to re-generate equivalent break points in the new class  
file. But that's actually not a trivial thing to do. How do you  
remember where break points were? By line number? what if you add/ 
delete lines? All the breakpoints would be in the wrong places. What,  
in fact, if you delete the line that contained the break point. It's  
a hard task.


> 2. Is it possible to use a different editor (such as jEdit which is  
> much
> more powerful) with Blue-J?

With a bit of work it is.

BlueJ has a published editor interface (and the source code of the  
BlueJ editor, that uses that interface, is published). If you can get  
the JEdit source, you can write an adapter that makes it work with  
the BlueJ edit API.

Michael