Ask HN: Review my project - Breve, a simple Java IDE. | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Review my project - Breve, a simple Java IDE.

20 pointsjlm38217 comments

A few classmates and I were working on a project for CS169 at UC Berkeley - the typical "software engineering" class that many seniors take immediately prior to graduating. No projects ever see the light of day - so we thought it'd be cool to launch ours right here on Hacker News.

Breve is a simplified Java IDE built for people who would otherwise use something like Eclipse. We've found Eclipse to be slow to load, difficult to learn, and difficult to use what we think should be built-in functionality. (ie, subversion integration)

Breve's about two things: 1) Simplified UI, lightning-fast to load. 2) Seamless Subversion Integration.

Breve does few things, is ridden with bugs, and that's why we'd like your feedback on it. A few of my group members were hesitant about releasing it so early, but ultimately agreed that it would be better to launch a half-baked version now.

In any case, the IDE can be seen and downloaded from http://getbreve.com. It supports Windows and Linux, with Mac on the way.

Looking forward to any feedback on what you'd like from such an IDE. Landing page feedback is helpful too :)

I use eclipse mainly because of auto complete, it saves me a lot of time, and I see and correct my mistakes immediately (tight feedback loop). If this is a serious project for you, yours should have this one feature for sure.

Screenshots?

Why not just contribute to Blue J or what differentiates you from them? http://www.bluej.org/

- Yup, we should add screenshots. Developers behind the project don't think of such obvious things. :)

- Our intent was to create something with power on the scale of Eclipse, but with a more simplified UI + faster load times.

- We're trying to think of the best way to communicate our idea to developers who haven't used Eclipse extensively, since it's that audience who would appreciate this the most.

Everybody that is a 'java developer' will have used some ide extensively, or at least almost as long as they have been using java. Using java nowadays without an ide is pretty hard (I know, I've tried), it's either intellij or eclipse.

To put a third ide on the market to compete with those two is going to be an uphill battle.

But simpler is better.

The great problem with those ide's in my view is not that the UI is too complicated, the real problem is that it is so very easy to mess up the build process. I don't know how many times I've had to fiddle with missing jar files, classpath settings and what not to restore a previously working installation to something that will work again.

It's also great when installing the same environment on a different machine and finding that there are subtle and very hard to resolve differences. But once it all works it works, as long as you don't mess with the machine. No automatic updates, no tweaking.

Not quite everyone - I've been developing in Java (among other things) for around ten years with Vim, and I personally know a few others using either Vim or Emacs exclusively.

Unfortunately, although we fit the "don't use Eclipse extensively" use case, this probably doesn't help the OP very much since it's doubtful that Yet Another Editor is going to be compelling to people heavily invested in their chosen tools.

On the other hand, what I would like to see is something that can run some Eclipse plugins, e.g. the BPEL editor, without needing to run the full platform.

what about netbeans? isn't that the 3rd contender for main stream java development?

Installer wouldn't run on my XP 64 laptop:

This application has failed to start because MSVCR100.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix this problem.

Update: Couldn't figure out how to use it on my 64-bit Ubuntu VM.

I'm curious about this, because I develop Eclipse RCP apps, and I've wondered before about making a stripped down ultralight JDT.

I love Eclipse, but I understand it's overkill for many, and it forces a lot of strange jargon on you all at once (working sets? perspectives? wtf?). The concepts make sense once you bend your mind to the Eclipse model, but is there an easier, more natural model?

Eclipse reminds me of the old Mozilla kitchen sink -- we need a Firefox, I mean a Chrome.

I also had problems running the installer on by 64bit machine. I looked in the binary and it seems that it basically downloads http://www.getbreve.com/BRE.jar and starts it.

It downloads slowly, HN effect?

If you're trying to run it on OS X, it looks like the actual jar is at http://www.getbreve.com/BRE.jar.

Didn't work for me.

True, the native executables are bootstrapping that jar.

If you're going to download it manually, you're going to specify the jar on your classpath, use com.breve.bre.BRE as the entry point, and specify the first argument as "com.breve.core.Breve"

The final command looks something like this: java -cp BRE.jar com.breve.bre.BRE com.breve.core.Breve

Any reason why you tried so hard to no have the jar run directly upon clicking on it ? You seem to use Main-Class in the MANIFEST, why the magic first argument ?

If you want to keep it really simple why don't you just give a jar-file directly? Why do you deal with all that native packaging?

The Simplest Java IDE

That would be notepad.exe. No, I'm not kidding. I learned Java using nothing but notepad.exe and javac on a Win98 box. Syntax highlighting seemed quite magical back then. ;-)

(Ok, ok, I know, editor != IDE…)

it says 100% open source... but where do you find the code?

I like the homepage and the idea, but I don't know how to install this. On Windows, all I get from the download link is a file called Breve5 that's 87.5kb.

Doesn't run on amd64. And, only 10KB in size? That can't be right...

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