Why?

So I’ve decided that I’m going to try to develop a plugin for developing JavaFX applications using the awesome IntelliJ IDEA IDE. You might be asking why would you try to do such a thing. And the question would be even more merited if you knew a few more things about me. Such as the fact I have never written any plugins for IDEA before, or any other application for that matter, nor have I written basically any JavaFX code, I’ve looked at some samples and thought it looked interesting. I do however use IDEA on a daily basis and I would say I’m quite good at the normal Java language. But back to the things I don’t know. I’ve never written a lexer or a parser or any other of that “compiler” stuff, except for trivial data representing input like csv files or almost-xml ™.

So the why? Well the thinking went something like this:

• I want to write simple games and demos as a hobby.
• JavaFX looks like a really cool way to possibly do this.
• NetBeans is currently the only viable way to write JavaFX code as far as I’m concerned.
• NetBeans is a horrible set back from what I’m used to have when writing Java code in IDEA.
• There is currently no support for JavaFX in IDEA, except for basic syntax highlighting.
• JetBrains don’t seem to be interested to write a plugin until JavaFX has proven itself.
• So if I want to write JavaFX in IDEA, I have to build the plugin myself.

As a added bonus I think I will learn alot durring this process of trying this out.  I also intend to document my progress and discoveries in this blog as I move along.