I am thinking of creating an Extensible from Server IDE Plugin and will start with IntelliJ as I have recent knowledge with. I’ve made a proof of concept and published the IDE source code https://github.com/tomavelev/app_builder_plugins. I will add documentation and demonstrations.
Common Programming Basics
No matter what programming language or technology you’ve chosen, you will need to
- map data models to the storing layer
- load data from these data sources
- visualize them
- and finally – execute some business logic
You may go from Java Spring Boot, to Quarkus, to Grails, or C#, or Go, to react to flutter, to plain JS/HTML. There are too many general purpose languages and platforms. All is somehow identical with the sugar and spice differences. In my opinion a lot of this common code – besides the concrete and specific business logic – could be generated, so you could focus on the practical business logic.
Never-Ending Change of the currently trending Frameworks
Every day a new front-end or back-end framework appears. You will need to Bootstrap code for most of the bullet points above. The ways this could be executed I’ve written in the blog post – Every Software Vendor Creates tools like these. Library Developers often provide such tools. But, Software vendors promote their own way of structuring and organizing stuff.
Flutter Example
For Example Prime Holding Flutter team – promotes a rx_bloc – Reactive BloC State Management. Different company will use (Very Good Ventures)’s implementation of BloC, or stick with provider or get_it, or riverpod. Implementing a plug-in or cli for every case seems endless.
IDE Extensions Points
For IDE Plugins – the thing is – every development editor has different APIs. It takes time to learn them all. My goal with this plugin is (or will be) – to move away from the integration with the IDEs and get the functionality – on a Back-End.
There are to main points where the developer interacts with – durign coding with IDE.
- Menu
- Select files and folders from the project explorer.
- Execute global action (from the top menu). In this case you may have not selected any file.
- Editor – these are the currently opened source code file(s) that you edit.
I’ve made an integration with the contextial menu of IntelliJ IDE and expanded – the creation of new actions to my Back-End. It is still Work In Progress. If you want to know what about my progress, you could ping me (for now at programtom@hotmail.com , I’ll create a email subsripton form later).