JDEE (Java Development Environment for Emacs) used to be best way to develop Java apps in Emacs a while back. It offered a ton of cool features, like smart auto-completion and a debugger. Unfortunately at some point the development slowed down significantly and the project went in a catatonic state. There was pretty much no activity for years in the official SourceForge repo and there was also no support for features introduced in Java 5+.

Recently, however, the project migrated to GitHub and it’s now way easier to get involved. Seems that some people have already started work on updating JDEE to support modern JDKs and modern Emacs functionality.

That’s a really exciting project, as Java support has traditionally been a weakness of Emacs and I’m writing this post with the hope that more people will help make JDEE great again.

So what are you waiting for? If you’re into Java and friends (Scala, Clojure, Groovy, etc), check out the new official repo and let’s get this party started!