[forge-dev] On the topic of the impedance mismatch between Forge and IDE's

[Max Rydahl Andersen]

Hi guys,

Returning from JBDS face-2-face last week I'm realising we got a few old known challenges and wondering what/how we can fix or at least make the issues non-issues.

The primary usecase for Forge from my POV is being able to reuse scaffolding and code generation as a replacement of Seam Gen functionality we have in Eclipse and
right now Forge is not there yet and I fear it won't be there within the next 1-2 months where we actually need to make progress on scaffolding and generation for things like
HTML5 and more. I'm wondering if we need to readjust our approach to how we use forge and its addons - maybe the "old" approach of sharing code/templates is a better one 
instead of requiring a full running Forge to make it work ?

I actually started writing a long email about the various issues but I realised that wouldn't be read by anyone, so I'm wondering if someone could give me quick summary
of what are happening in context of Forge 1 or even 2 when it comes to making it easier/better to utilize Forge addons from something like Eclipse ? 

To give an idea of my main concerns here is a quick list:
  * startup time
  * how to keep forge addons uptodate/in-sync to keep working together
  * Support a "multi-step wizard" approach for one and combined forge commands
  * How to not have too many hard requirements of the sequence or if possibly any need of Forge setup commands to use Forge to simply generate code
     (i.e. today I have to wait for Forge to parse and understand maven metamodel and more to just use its generate code functionality - meaning if I just have a plain
      eclipse project or even a gradle project or ant project I can use Eclipse tooling to generate wizards, but Forge are not possible (or at least very slow in comparison, even when ignoring startup time))

/max