OSS Experience: jEdit

Overview

The purpose of this assignment is to familiarize ourselves with an open source project that's interesting to us. The project I chose to blog about is called jEdit. jEdit is a text editor written in Java. Java enables it to run in multiple operating systems. According to its web page, "jEdit is a mature programmer's text editor with hundreds (counting the time developing plugins) of person-years of development behind it." I went ahead and downloaded the Mac OS X package to see what the project has to offer.

Prime Directive 1

The project's main purpose is to edit text and it does it like every other text editors out there. One of the features that makes this a great text editor for programmers is its ability to be enhanced by installing plugins. jEdit has a large collection of plugins created by a "world-wide developer team." This simple text editor could be configured with the right plugins and become a very useful IDE.

PD1: Pass

Prime Directive 2

As a non-developer, this package was pretty easy to setup. It was up and running in a matter of minutes. The Mac OS X package comes in a .dmg file. Once downloaded, the dmg file mounts itself with one file in its directory. I simply copied the jEdit application file to my Applications directory. The application launched with no problems. The Download page provides an easy to follow User's guide. Another feature that I liked about the application is the display of "Tip of the Day." It's a neat way of learning the application's features.

PD2: Pass

Prime Directive 3

jEdit has a great community based development that continues to fix bugs and add features. A developer can easily join the community and start contributing to the project. A developer can contribute in the following specific category; writing/updating edit modes, writing macros, writing plugins, and fixing plugin or core bugs. From the looks of things, it seems pretty easy for a new developer like me to dive right in and modify and improve the project.

PD3: Pass

David Joel Lazaro