Hi George,

actually I haven't been tried Forge, but now I tried it and I can share my thoughts.
I did not have time to use Forge project in the real life, but I installed and tested it a little and walk through several tutorials and examples. For now I am amazed with it's simplicity and usability of this tool.
For example, before I discovered Maven I have previous experience with crating of JEE project setup, or using Hibernate so I know how amount of Google-ing, how much effort is needed, and how painful process was that.
Because of that, I appreciate tools like Forge.

Regarding my previous idea, I think it can be applied to Forge, too. I think that Tattletale could be used by Forge through its plug-in(addon) mechanism.

Because Forge is not limited only to creating and displaying the reports, but most of his commands are created to solve common problems, we should implement remove-unused-dependencies addon with reporting capabilities, too. This extension should use Tattletale for the core logic.

So idea is to:

Create Tattletale addon for Forge2

The main features of future plugin remains the same as that are previously proposed for the Eclipse plugin:

Tattletale tool requires that all dependencies should be placed in the same folder. Tattletale Forge plugin should be able to automatically recognize all libraries referenced by the different types of projects project.
This plugin should include compiled classes of current project into report. This way, developer does not have to create build(all jars) to create the valid Tattletale report. Process should be automated.
list-duplicated-classes command should be implemented(Multiple Locations report should be used)
find/list-unused-dependencies command should be implemented (Unused Jars report should be used).
We should add commands like "remove-unused-dependencies", "eliminate-dependencies-with different-versions". The nature of Forge tool is not only "advisory" and it should be able to manage class-path for example, for Maven projects.
These commands should be able to guide user through step by step process of finding/marking and removing the unused dependencies.
For the beginning we should create plugin and make it work fine with one type of projects(Maven), and then in the next iterations we could expand support for more type of projects.
This plugin should be able to create default Tattletale HTML report.

I already started developing my first Forge plugin. You have great tutorial here: http://forge.jboss.org/docs/plugin_development/#content
I will play with it for a while, review API, and then will come with mode in-depth proposal.

It will be great if we can create this plugin as part of GSoC 2014.

Please, review the ideas, advice and feel free to comment

Thank you

Dejan

On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 3:53 PM, George Gastaldi <ggastald@redhat.com> wrote:

Nice to meet you Dejan.

First of all, have you tried Forge 2? I'd like you to give it a try:

https://github.com/forge/core/blob/master/README.asciidoc

The idea in Forge is to provide tooling that is not coupled to the IDE implementation, that is, the code you write will run in Shell, Eclipse, NetBeans, IDEA, etc (as long as there is an implementation of the Forge APIs for each IDE - at the moment we have Eclipse and Shell).

I believe that a Tattletale addon would be nice to have.
There is also a talk about Forge 2 in here: http://t.co/aWCzQPWeTp (Thanks to Ivan).

Best Regards,

George Gastaldi

On 19-03-2014 07:41, Dejan Simeonov wrote:
Hi Forge team, Hi George,

Let me briefly introduce myself:

My name is Dejan Simeonov, and I am final-year student of Faculty of Organizational Sciences, University of Belgrade, Serbia.

I have experience with Java, PHP, HTML and CSS, SVN, GIT... I am familiar with Eclipse and several open-source tools for Statistic Code analysis as Eclipse and Hudson plugins.

Currently I am learning about Maven and Eclipse Plugins implementation.

And I would like to participate as a student in Google Summer Of Code 2014.

Several days ago I proposed my ideas for GSoC to Jonathan, JBoss's GSoC mentor. We talked about them and he advised me to review one of them with you, Forge team, hopefully to help me with the concrete details and specification.

One of tools I used is Tattletale. I found it very useful for investigating dependencies inside the project and to discovering unused jars.

I used it as command line and Maven plugin, but I think it could be even more useful as Eclipse plugin. So, idea is:

Create Tattletale plugin for Eclipse

Lot of tools have plugin for Eclipse. (Findbugs, PMD...). Tattletale plugin for Eclipse still does not exist, but this way it should be easier to use comparing to usage trough console . Tattletale tool could be used as engine for this plugin. The basic plugin implementation could display standard Tattletale HTML report inside the Eclipse, but some sub reports like "Unused Jar" or "Multiple Jar files" could "mark" some referenced libraries displayed in the Eclipse controls and highlight them for the removal.

I investigate a little and I found that developers like to periodically use the Tattletale tool to review dependencies inside the project, to remove unused ones and this way, to keep projects 'fit'.

This option could be one of the main feature of the future plugin.

Other things this plugin should be able to do are (several ideas):

Tattletale tool requires that all dependencies should be placed in the same folder. Tattletale Eclipse plugin should be able to automatically recognize all libraries referenced by the Eclipse project, like jars inside the project, external jars and Maven dependencies.

This plugin should include compiled classes of current Eclipse project into report. Dependent eclipse project should be included, too. This way, developer does not have to create build(all jars) to create the valid Tattletale report.

Mark Duplicated class in the Project Explorer(Multiple Locations report should be used). This is possible, Eclipse API supports this, Findbugs plugin can do it.

Mark Unused JAR files in the Project Explorer's Referenced Libraries node(Unused Jars report should be used). Currently, I do not know is this possible.

This plugin should be able to create and open default HTML report in Eclipse plugin. This report could allow to navigate to particular class listed in it using CTRL+LeftClick. Currently Tattletale does not support this.

Graphical dependencies report should work "out of the box"

We could add options like "Remove unused dependencies", "Eliminate Jar files with different versions", but this should be discussed. This tool could have only "advisory" nature and could manage class-path for Maven and Eclipse Java projects. I am not sure should we provide potentially risky options which are managing eclipse project class-path?

This plugin could be displayed in the new "Tattletale Eclipse perspective".

I should ask you if someone is interested to become a GSoC mentor for this project, to finish it together?

In this case, I could try implement prototype of this plugin with basic options as part of the GSoC proposal evaluation process.

I think I can finish this plugin, and this project seems as great opportunity to me, first, to create an useful tool which will be widely used as part of Eclipse and to gain more experience in lot of open-source tools.

Please, feel free to ask if you have any questions, Any comment or suggestions is appriciated.

Best Regards,

Dejan Simeonov
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