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Best practive for prototyping tools in Eclipse [message #1857841]

Wed, 01 March 2023 00:26

Jörn Guy Süß

Messages: 320
Registered: July 2009
Location: Anstead, Brisbane, Queens...

Senior Member

I have had a significant number of use cases developing in Epsilon where I want to prototype a tool while developing a workflow. Such tools usually only have Java library dependencies. It is quite tedious and a bit brittle to perform a deployment of the plugin into the platform to merely make a project-scoped and prototypical tool available.

I have seen the advice on installing the tool into the context in stand-alone mode. I wonder if such a call would also be possible from Eclipse mode somehow?

context.getNativeTypeDelegates().add(new ExtensionPointToolNativeTypeDelegate());

It seems that from EOLmodule the context is available. I assume what would be missing is a means to specify the additional classpath. If EOLModule had a

addNativeTypes(String classpath);

method, this would allow a much smoother development experience.

Any views on this?

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Re: Best practive for prototyping tools in Eclipse [message #1857846 is a reply to message #1857841]

Wed, 01 March 2023 11:47

Dimitris Kolovos

Messages: 2163
Registered: July 2009
Location: York, UK

Senior Member

To avoid having to install the tool from an update site for every change you make to it, my suggestion would be to use an Eclipse instance to develop your tool, and a second (nested) Eclipse instance (ran in Debug mode) to edit/execute your Epsilon programs. Modifying the classpath at runtime can be tricky to get right across different operating systems and versions of Java so I'd avoid doing that.

Thanks,
Dimitris

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