Including support for Bazel

[guw]

Greetings JDT LS Developers,

I am working on Bazel support for JDT/Eclipse. I would like it to be included in JDT LS to make the out of the box experience easier for users. Currently they have to install additional extensions.

I wonder what requirements exists for including this into JDT LS? I see that Gradle and Maven are both Eclipse projects. Does the Bazel Eclipse project need to be hosted at Eclipse.org as an Eclipse project?

[akaroml]

BSP could be a nice bridge between LS and different build tools. And there's a Bazel implementation already. These pieces make it much lower hanging for adoption. What do you think? @guw

[guw]

I don't think BSP is a proper a replacement for LSP. One still needs a language server for the advanced IDE features. The Eclipse JDT LS requires a classpath container for proper functionality,, which is not provided by BSP. This is what the Bazel Eclipse Feature provides.

[akaroml]

Got your point. BSP and LSP are complementary. They don't replace each other. BSP helps separate the concern of building artifacts from LSP, and they work together responsible for different tasks.

[rgrunber]

I think it just comes down to how much larger/more complicated does the JDT-LS product become to maintain, and whether there are sizable number of users that would be interested. Looking at https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=BazelBuild.vscode-bazel there seems to be a large user base.

If the only current use-case for the Bazel JDT-LS contribution is for VS Code, would you be open to first recommending to install salesforce.bazel-vscode in vscode-java when we detect a bazel project (at least initially before discussing integrating it) ?

Yes, we'd probably have to include (ASL-2.0?) code into the JDT-LS repo (at Eclipse) if we end up adding the contribution bundle.