RE: [platform-scripting-dev] Let's revive the scripting project

["Ed Burnette" <Ed.Burnette@xxxxxxx>]

Yes, it's likely that much of the work will need to be done by people outside the Platform team.

You may also be interested in escript (http://www.eclipsefaq.org/chris/faq/Book%20materials/Book%20samples/eScript/index.html). This defines a new language for creating plug-ins which may be simpler than plugin.xml and all that.

These are all good ideas but maybe we should try to limit the scope of scripting for the first version. There are some things that are so basic, things that people take for granted in other IDEs and editors, that Eclipse should be able to do them.

Here are some use cases to show what I mean:

1. I want to do a build, export a jar file, and start running a program. Now say I have to do that dozens of times a day. We should make it really simple for a user to combine those three actions and bind them to a single key.

2. I'm given a large text file and I have to do something repetitive on it. One time I had to join every other line together, deleting two characters from the beginning of the second line. I'm usually forced to break out Textpad and use its macro/record facility, but I should be able to stay in Eclipse.

3. I have a program running and it generates some output in the console. Among other things, the program outputs path names. When I Ctrl+Click (or whatever I've defined) on one of those path names, I want it to analyze the text under the cursor, finding the beginning and the end of the path, and open an editor on that file. It sounds trivial but we have this capability in an internal Unix xterm-clone where I work and it's probably the most popular feature. Emacs users can write a function to do that too. (I know about console hyperlinks and regexps but I'm just using this as an example).

4. I want to define something to run right before a file is saved or right before it's checked into (or out of) the Team repository. Typically I want to format the code or organize imports or do a spell check or a code style check or something like that. Instead of trying to implement every feature somebody might want, if you have scripting then you can implement some kind of hook so that a little bit of logic can get run at the critical times and that logic can be defined later to do whatever is necessary.


> -----Original Message-----
> From: platform-scripting-dev-admin@xxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:platform-scripting-dev-admin@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf
> Of Andrey Platov
> Sent: Thursday, December 09, 2004 2:11 PM
> To: platform-scripting-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [platform-scripting-dev] Re: [eclipse-dev] Let's
> revive the scripting project
>
> Dear Ed,
>
> For a lot of time we're at xored software dream to start work on
> scripting for Eclipse Platform... Not limited with
> macros/automation but
> targeted to more general scripting framework.
>
> The idea of the freamework is the possibility to develop virtually any
> Eclipse plugin as well as develop Eclipse extensions with scripting
> language using XUL-like approach (XML for GUI declaration and
> scripting
> language for the logic).
>
> Shining eclipse runtime have no architectural barriers to
> develop such a
> framework and to script Eclipse extension logic directly in plugin.xml
> and/or external script files. Joining everyting with the power of
> scripting can result in easy and fast approach to script any
> non-GUI or
> GUI extension like Views, Actions, Eclipse Forms Editors, etc
> and result
> in much more productivity for Java developers and drastically increase
> Eclipse popularity for non-Java developers.
>
> Please sorry for trivial exciting words, the question: is it possible
> for external teams to participate in any fashion
> (contribute/comment/etc)?
>
> Thanks and Kind Regards,
> Andrey Platov
> xored software, inc
> http://www.xored.com
>