[ease-dev] Executing EASE without the UI

[Geneviève Bastien <gbastien+lttng@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,


First, I'd like to thank you for this great feature! With it, we
developed full scripting support for the Trace Compass tool. This is the
addition that we really needed and our users are very happy with all the
possibilities it offers. We couldn't do it without all the work you've
put into the EASE Framework. FYI, here's a blog post I wrote for the
Trace Compass Scripting feature, using EASE:
http://versatic.net/tracecompass/introducingEase.html


Moving forward, Trace Compass, an Eclipse project, is slowly moving to
the cloud, becoming an extension to the theia IDE [1]. That means we
will package all of our .core Eclipse plugins into a web server and we
won't need the .ui plugins anymore (though they will still work as
Eclipse plugin, we're not getting completely rid of it). That requires a
bit of rearchitecturing on our part, but we're getting there... EASE is
one of the feature that we'd like to be able to execute with only .core.


But as a first use case, we'd like to be able to execute a script in
headless mode, for instance from the command line:

./tracecompass --script /path/to/script --open /path/to/mytrace


Do you know how much work would be required on the EASE side to not
require the .ui plugins? For instance, is there a method in .core
equivalent to what happens when we click Run As... -> EASE Script to
automatically select the engine from a file name and execute it? What I
found for our unit tests is to explicitly list the available engines and
see if one of those supports the file we have. Is there anything else
that heavily depends on the UI?


[1] https://www.theia-ide.org/


Thanks,

Geneviève