I started out my development by installing some basic tools and things I knew I would need and then starting my first “Hello world”-ish project.
I already had IntelliJ IDEA installed. So what I knew I needed was the plugin development kid. When that was installed I started a new project and choose the plugin kind. Then I simply pressed play. And it all worked. Success. After that I created a new project in the IDEA that is running the plugin. This project will host my test-files, not JUnit just files to see if everything works. And this worked to. Success again. I hadn’t expected this to be a big problem and so far it wasn’t. I had some issues though.
Slow Host start up
Problem: When you run a plugin project in IDEA it creates a new instance of the IDE to host your plugin. But the problem was that I have so much plugins and things in my IDEA installation that starting a new instance took a long time. So when I want to try my plugin out it take a long time to start it.
Solution: Disable all plugins in the host IDEA. This apparantly does not affect the normal IDEA since they don’t seem to share settings. After this IDEA started quickly enough for me.
Improvements: It would be nice to be able to reload the plugin without haveing to restart the host IDEA but I don’t know if that is even possible. Will have to look it up if startup becomes to bothersome.
Slow Project start up
Problem: When the host IDEA started my “test-project” it for some reason had to rescan the Java SDK every time. This takes quite a long time. I’ve noticed this in normal java development as well but there it’s not a problem because you start IDEA at most once a day. But here I need to restart often and it really takes time.
Solution: Remove the Java SDK from the project. Not it loaded without problems.
Improvements: Clearly this is only a temporary solution since I will need the SDK eventually for resolving references in the JavaFX scripts. So parhaps there’s some way to prevent IDEA from rescaning the SDK. Will have to look this up pretty soon.
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