The team at Microsoft who support Visual Studio Code (better known as VS Code) has announced the release of an extension to run and debug Java JUnit test cases. The extension works with the Java Language Support extension provided by Red Hat and the Debugger for Java to complete the end-to-end development experience for developers working in the Java language in the editor.
The team at Microsoft who support Visual Studio Code (better known as VS Code) has announced the release of an extension to run and debug Java JUnit test cases. The extension works with the Java Language Support extension provided by Red Hat and the Debugger for Java to complete the end-to-end development experience for developers working in the Java language in the editor.
VS Code is a lightweight, multi-language code editor from Microsoft not to be confused with Visual Studio, their full-blown IDE for. Net development. The editor is primarily aimed as a tool for developing modern web applications in JavaScript, TypeScript and Node, with the end-to-end developer experience for those languages provided natively out of the box. Through an extensibility system, VS Code can also support other languages and frameworks and this further enables the editor to support hundreds of other languages, including C, C++, C#, Python, Ruby, PHP and Java. In the less than two years since its launch in April 2015, VS Code has risen in popularity to become the world’s 11th most popular IDE according to the PYPL index. Xiaokai He, the Java Tools and Services program manager at Microsoft, told InfoQ that their long term plan was ‘to make VS Code the best editor for Java’.
The new Java JUnit extensions have resulted in an update to the Java Debugger extension (to version 0.4.0). The standard VS Code debug console does not allow input, so the capability of launching an application using an external or integrated terminal within VS Code has been added.
Like the Java Debugger, the Junit extensions have already been open sourced and are available on github. This is part of a deliberate strategy previously outlined to InfoQ by Xiaokai He, who said that the Open Source process has proved very valuable in helping the team both engage with the Java community and collaborate with Red Hat in the creation of the extensions.
Further Java capabilities for VS Code are still to come. The 2018 Roadmap lists support for hot code replacement during Java debugging. Xiaokai He also told InfoQ that other VS Code extensions in the pipeline include a maven project explorer and support for tomcat and checkstyle.
