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JEdwards is a little sub-project I've just been putting together in Java. Screenshot.

It's so named for two reasons:

1. it's roughly a contraction of "towards a Javascript editor"
2. it's something you probably want to ignore (like twincest :)

Having said that, it does have a couple of features that may be of interest to sane developers:

1. a Java terminal emulator (bash shell)
2. syntax highlighting for SPARQL/Turtle

Neither are entirely finished, but both are useable/reusable (Apache 2 license, or somesuch).

I've been using Eclipse for most of my dev stuff for years now. When I was doing things in Node.js I wound up configuring it to have a file explorer pane, a text editor pane (for Javascript, HTML, Turtle or SPARQL) and three terminal panes all connected to the local shell. Eclipse was basically a (slow) sledgehammer to crack a nut. I did spend a while looking for a way of setting these things up using separate apps, but was beaten by the problem of pinning the windows to the workspace. I believe it should be possible using Devil's Pie or similar, but I had no joy. But as it happened I wanted a terminal emulator in Java anyhow and had played with syntax highlighting before.

In Scute I'd put together some basic highlighting for Turtle, except when I came to look at it again it was a bit too hardcoded to reuse, and Javascript is quite complicated... Looking around I came across jsyntaxpane, which is a pluggable highlighter which takes its config from a JFlex lexer. It'd got the necessary for Javascript, so I decided to use that instead of my hacky code. I found a SPARQL/Flex file on the Web that someone had prepared for IntelliJ IDEA which although was geared to do other things saved me a bit of time writing out the SPARQL patterns. Here's sparql.flex.

For the terminal emulator I started with the JConsole UI from BeanShell, to which I've adding the bits which talk to the bash shell. It works ok on this Ubuntu machine, I've no idea what would be needed to set it up for a different OS. The source for that is here.

I started Scute, a desktop RDF toolkit, just over a year ago. I did get some bits working fairly well - I was using the SPARQL bits for real - but then I got distracted and left it largely unusable... This JEdwards bit of coding has got me back into it, and tightened up how I was thinking about the dev process. I must write this up properly. The main idea is, while it should be built from reusable components, the way it's setup as a whole will be optimized for how I want to work. Somewhat inspired by woodcarving, where a lot of the time what's best isn't a general purpose tool (wood router or software IDE) but a highly focused tool (1/4" No.4 fishtail gouge or JEdwards). If the resulting code is useful for other people, great, but the motivation isn't to create a product, just to help my own personal workflow. Horse before cart dogfood.

The reusable components part comes from testing. I'm lazy about tests at the best of times, and Scute is all about GUI so is a bit tricky to test. But I reckon component-level functional tests make a fair a substitute for unit tests. Anyhow, more about this another day.