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IDX Java Development Environment

What is IDX?

IDX is a powerful development environment that combines the best and most useful features of current development environments while focusing on speed and simplicity. IDX has a range of features designed to help you more quickly and efficiently understand both the code and the design and is ideal for developers that appreciate and prefer a streamlined environment to work in.

IDX Main Window - Click for bigger screenshot

Contents

Features

Automatic class diagrams
Code Complete
Task List
Code Templates
Ant Support
Source Control Support
Advanced Search functions
Third Party Package Managment

Fast Native Windows Application

Other Features











Automatic class diagrams

Class Diagram - Click for bigger screenshot

The class diagram modeling feature allows the developer to visually design a static class model and implement those classes simultaneously. This is because the IDX diagramming feature provides realtime updating, so the model always represents the code, and the code always represents the model.

IDX also draws associative links in the Source Diagram when it encounters certain special identifiers in the source code such as link references and XDoclet style associations.

Code Complete

The Code Complete feature assists you while you are typing by displaying a small scrollable list that contains potential calls, such as methods and variables. The editor will examine the elements as you type them, determine types, return values, methods, and members. Then it will display the possible calls in the list. You can then select the item you want by scrolling to it and pressing enter.

Movies:

Code Insight - 835Kb AVI - Shows how you can get information about anything in the source
Code Complete - 430Kb AVI - Demo of code completion features in IDX

Code Complete - Click for bigger screenshot


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Code Templates

Learning to use the IDX templating efficiently will greatly increase a developers productivity. Fortunately, using templates is as easy to use as code completion.

Templates are accessible three ways:

- From the main Templates toolbar item. This method gives a newer developer visibility of the feature, just a single click away.

- From the Templates menu item in the editor's context menu. This provides a bit easier and more common access, since most editor features are accessed here.

- From the code completion menu. This is the fastest method since those templates defined with shortcuts will show just as any code complete element.

The benefit of accessing the templates via the menus provides a more organized view of the templates, and shows you clearly which ones are available.

Accessing the templates via the code-complete list provides a fast and precise way of selecting a templates. This method is avaiable to templates that have shortcuts defined.

Movies:

Code Templates - 138Kb AVI - Demonstrates how code templates work

Task List

The IDX task list provides task management functionality that allows you to keep a list of tasks and todo items.Tasks that have been entered in the source code as comments will automatically be added to the task list. You can view tasks for the current source file, the active module and the entire workspace by the click of a button.

Task List - Click for bigger screenshot

IDX will recognize a variety of common identifiers in the source code such as BUG, TODO and many others. You can also specify the priority and completion status of the tasks directly in the source code.

You can export the task list to HTML and CSV (Comma Separated Values) formats. The CSV format is suitable for further integration into Excel and many other programs.


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Ant Support

Ant is a powerful XML-based build tool that was can be used to construct complex build sequences for large code bases. Ant is Java-based and has been designed to be cross-platform and works well on both Windows and UNIX-based systems.

IDX features extensive built-in support for Ant:

  • You can create advanced build-scripts by plugging in custom extensions, either by writing them yourself or by tapping into the large repository of available extensions that is available on the net.
  • Ant is based on XML which makes it easy to describe the build process.
  • Ant contains an extensive built-in library of functionality and tasks and will allow you to perform virtually any needed build task without platform dependencies.
  • You can customize the build flow to integrate 3rd party tools such as XDoclet and JUnit.
  • You can selectively run sub-tasks of the script as needed during development to run only the necessary parts of the build at each time.


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Source Control Support

IDX uses the industry standard SCC protocol to connect to Source Control providers. IDX supports a variety of Source Control providers such as CVS, Subversion, Perforce, Microsoft Visual Source Safe, Rational ClearCase, and many others. For a partial list of compatible source control providers click here.

Advanced Search functions

The advanced search functionality allows you to quickly perform searches across multiple modules and displays the results in an easy-to-read grid. Clicking on any of the search results will bring up the source file with the matched line visible.

Search Window - Click for bigger screenshot

When the find is executed, the Search window is opened (if it is not already visible) and the search tab is selected. The search results grid is reset and is updated with each occurrence of the found string and the line number and file name of the file in which it was found.

IDX also supports regular expression searches and multi-line searches.


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Fast Native Windows Application

Since IDX is a native Windows program it has a smaller memory footprint, takes fewer resources and is faster compared to competing IDEs.


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Third Party Package Managment

The IDX Third Party Package management system that simplifies the task of integrating frameworks that are not part of the standard Java distribution into your projects.

How it works

The IDX Third Party Package manager communicates with the Optistic servers to download a list of available packages. You can chose which packages you would like to download, and they will automatically be downloaded and made available to your projects.

What will be installed

The package manager downloads only the required JAR files and any supporting required configuration and resource files. If you need to download the source, samples, or documentation, IDX provides convenient links to the homepage of the project and any relevant documentation.

Third Party Package Managment - Click for bigger screenshot


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Other Features

IDX supports a variety of features designed to allow you to be more productive and to enjoy working with the code and the models. Below is a partial listing of the features designed to do this:

  • Smart Build - Saves time by rebuilding only the source files that need to be recompiled.
  • Framework Templates - Allows multiple classes to be bundled together into frameworks of classes.
  • XDoclet Integration - IDX will render XDoclet associations in the class diagrams.
  • Properties Window - Allows you to change many properties of classes and methods without touching the source code.
  • External Tools - IDX can invoke external tools and allows you to integrate 3rd party software into the IDE.
  • Context Sensitive Java API Help - Makes it easy to quickly find API help while working in the code.
  • ... and much more.

Build Window - Click for bigger screenshot

Wide Range of Uses

- Facilitating rapid application development (RAD) for engineering companies and financial institutions
- Producing professional-quality, robust software for internal or external use
- Loading, analyzing, and visualizing source code
- Handling complex software environments with large source code bases

Fully Featured, Fully Integrated

At a superficial level, IDX is an amazing, yet easy to use programmers editor. A comprehensive set of productivity features are ready-to-use -- often with just one mouse click or command.

While working with IDX, you will appreciate the source diagramming that produces clean and easy to read class diagrams that make it easy to understand source code relationships and function.

The Code Library contains a wide variety of code templates, designed for many common uses.

Native integration with industry standard technologies such as Ant ensures that IDX works well in a non-homogenous environment.

Easy Programming, Powerful Results

The move from ad-hoc programming to a structured design environment can occur evolutionarily. IDX supports the transition by allowing you to align existing source code with new design paradigms.

The IDX editor increases your productivity by understanding the code you write. It offers many familiar features such as code complete, but also allows you to interactively examine any element of your source and retrieve in-depth information about any part of your source code. This provides instant access to information typically more difficult to retrieve.

The core focus of the IDX editor is to streamline your environment, and increase development productivity.

Software Integration

Read more about the software integration challenge and how IDX can help you solve it.


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Questions?

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