I am working on an Eclipse Plug-in which provides property auto-completions with a ICompletionProposalComputer contributed via the org.eclipse.wst.sse.ui.completionProposal.
I'd like to create automated tests for the functionality but have no idea where to start. How can I write automated tests for my proposal computer?
Some time ago a colleague and I had a similar problem while implementing a IContentAssistProcessor for a SourceViewer based editor in a console view.
We started with an integration test that simulated a Ctrl+Space key stroke within the console editor and expected a shell with a table that holds the proposal(s) to show up.
Here is such a test case: ConsoleContentAssistPDETest. It uses a ConsoleBot that encapusulates the key stroke simulation and a custom AssertJ assertion that hides the details of waiting for the shell to open and finding the table, etc. (ConsoleAssert)
With such a test in place we were able to implement a walking skeleton. We developed individual parts of the content proposal code test-driven with unit tests.
Instead of writing your own bot you may also look into SWTBot which provides an API to write UI/functional tests.
I ended up writing a simple SWTBot test. Once I have the editor open, it's pretty simple to get a list of autocompletions:
bot.editorByTitle("index.html").toTextEditor();
editor.insertText("<html>\n<div ></div>\n</html>");
editor.navigateTo(1, 5);
editor.getAutoCompleteProposals("")
We use gradle as our build tool and use the idea plugin to be able to generate the project/module files. The process for a new developer on the project would look like this:
pull from source control.
run 'gradle idea'.
open idea and be able to develop without any further setup.
This all works nicely, but generally only gets exercised when a new developer joins or someone gets a new machine. I would really like to automate the testing of this more frequently in the same way we automate our unit/integration tests as part of our continuous integration process.
Does anyone know if this is possible and if there is any libraries for doing this kind of thing?
You can also substitue idea for eclipse as we have a similar process for those that prefer using eclipse.
The second step (with or without step one) is easy to smoke test (just execute the task as part of a CI build), the third one less so. However, if you are following best practices and regenerate IDEA files rather than committing them to source control, developers will likely perform both steps more or less regularly (e.g. every time a dependency changes).
As Peter noted, the real challenge is step #3. The first 2 ones are solved by your SCM plugin and gradle task. You could try automating the last task by doing something like this
identify the proper command line option, on your platform, that opens a specified intellij project from the command line
find a simple good enough scenario that could validate that the generated project is working as it should. E.g. make a clean then build. Make sure you can reproduce these steps using keyboard shortcuts only. Validation could be made by validating either produced artifacts or test result reports, etc
use an external library, like Robot, to program the starting of intellij and the running of your keyboards. Here's a simple example with Robot. Use a dynamic language with inbuilt console instead of pure Java for that, it will speed your scripting a lot...
Another idea would be to include a daemon plugin in intellij to pass back the commands from external CLI. Otherwise take contact with the intellij team, they may have something to ease your work here.
Notes:
beware of false negatives: any failure could be caused by external issues, like project instability. Try to make sure you only build from a validated working project...
beware of false positives: any assumption / unchecked result code could hide issues. Make sure you clean properly the workspace, installation, to have a repeatable state and standard scenario matching first use.
Final thoughts: while interesting from a theoretical angle, this automation exercise may not bring all the required results, i.e. the validation of the platform. Still it's an interesting learning experience and could serve as a material for a nice short talk, especially if you find out interesting stuff. Make it a beer challenger with your team when you have a few idle hours to try to see who can implement the fastest a working solution ;) Good luck!
I am trying to create a new editor plugin for Eclipse that I can distribute to others to help edit input files for a scientific computing program.
Features I would like in the program include:
Syntax Highlighting
Error Parsing
Content Assist
In general these files contain a set of related objects of the format:
ObjectType,
Field 1, !- Comment describing Field 1
Field 2, !- Comment describing Field 2
...
Field N; !- Comment describing Field N
! more
! comments
Where fields can be strings, numeric values or references to other objects depending on the object type.
Error parsing would check to make sure that each field is of the correct type, that referenced objects exist, and that each object ends in a semi-colon, etc. Content assist would provide a list of valid references for a field, provide defaults where available, etc.
Background
So far I've done a little bit of exploring in Xtext, and it seems to be able to handle most of what I'd like to do and much more, but I'm wondering if the Xtext plugin for our input file syntax would be distributed and used by other users.
I am looking for something that will be easy for users to install and use who are not already familiar with Eclipse and/or programming. Maybe there is an even better solution than Eclipse, but I would like it to be cross-platform and free (in both senses).
Question 1:
Do plugins created with Xtext require Xtext to generate the language artifacts on every machine that wants to use my editor and its features?
Question 2:
If so, what alternatives are there to create an editor with these features?
Regarding Question 1:
Do plugins created with Xtext require Xtext to generate the language artifacts on every machine that wants to use my editor and its features?
Nooooo. Simply put: You as a "toolsmith" forge the tool "Eclipse Editor Plugin". You deliver your tool to the users of the tool. You do NOT deliver the steps to reproduce the tool to the users.
Back to technical terms: You write the grammar, generates the Xtext artefacts, flesh out a few hooks and then you export the UI project as an Eclipse Plugin and/or as a "deployable feature". This will generate a few files (<10) which other users can install using the standard SW installation procedures of Eclipse.
Regarding Question 2:
If so, what alternatives are there to create an editor with these features?
Obsolete.
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Eclipse: How can I execute a launch configuration programmatically?
I want to write an Eclipse Plugin that can programmatically create Debug Launch configurations for 'Remote Java Application' and also Launch the configuration programmatically.
Is this possible? Can someone give me pointers to get me started?
I don't have a great deal of experience authoring Eclipse plugins but I am quite experienced using it for my daily dev work.
I am keen on writing this plugin to simply my debugging process which currently involves manually launching a debug configuration for every JVM (at least 3) that I want to debug, which slows me down tremendously.
To create the actual plugin, there are several example ones available in Eclipse if you have the Eclipse PDE installation. Look at this tutorial for help to get started.
That guide will get you a sample application with a toolbar button and a meny alternative. Alter the code to make it look like you want, then use the help from the other comments to launch the programs.
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I've seen questions about IDE's here -- Which is the best IDE for Scala development? and What is the current state of tooling for Scala?, but I've had mixed experiences with IDEs. Right now, I'm using the Eclipse IDE with the automatic workspace refresh option, and KDE 4's Kate as my text editor. Here are some of the problems I'd like to solve:
use my own editor IDEs are really geared at everyone using their components. I like Kate better, but the refresh system is very annoying (it doesn't use inotify, rather, maybe a 10s polling interval). The reason I don't use the built-in text editor is because broken auto-complete functionalities cause the IDE to hang for maybe 10s.
rebuild only modified files The Eclipse build system is broken. It doesn't know when to rebuild classes. I find myself almost half of the time going to project->clean. Worse, it seems even after it has finished building my project, a few minutes later it will pop up with some bizarre error (edit - these errors appear to be things that were previously solved with a project > clean, but then come back up...). Finally, setting "Preferences / Continue launch if project contains errors" to "prompt" seems to have no effect for Scala projects (i.e. it always launches even if there are errors).
build customization I can use the "nightly" release, but I'll want to modify and use my own Scala builds, not the compiler that's built into the IDE's plugin. It would also be nice to pass [e.g.] -Xprint:jvm to the compiler (to print out lowered code).
fast compiling Though Eclipse doesn't always build right, it does seem snappy -- even more so than fsc.
I looked at Ant and Maven, though haven't employed either yet (I'll also need to spend time solving #3 and #4). I wanted to see if anyone has other suggestions before I spend time getting a suboptimal build system working. Thanks in advance!
UPDATE - I'm now using Maven, passing a project as a compiler plugin to it. It seems fast enough; I'm not sure what kind of jar caching Maven does. A current repository for Scala 2.8.0 is available [link]. The archetypes are very cool, and cross-platform support seems very good. However, about compile issues, I'm not sure if fsc is actually fixed, or my project is stable enough (e.g. class names aren't changing) -- running it manually doesn't bother me as much. If you'd like to see an example, feel free to browse the pom.xml files I'm using [github].
UPDATE 2 - from benchmarks I've seen, Daniel Spiewak is right that buildr's faster than Maven (and, if one is doing incremental changes, Maven's 10 second latency gets annoying), so if one can craft a compatible build file, then it's probably worth it...
Points 2 and 4 are extremely difficult to manage with the current scalac. The problem is that Scala's compiler is a little dumb about building files. Basically, it will build whatever you feed it, regardless of whether or not that file really needs to be built. Scala 2.8.0 will have some tremendous improvements in this respect, but until then... Eclipse SDT actually has some very elaborate (and very hackish) code for doing change detection and dependency tracking. On the whole, it does a decent job, but as you have seen, there are wrinkles. Eclipse SDT 2.8.0 will rely on the aforementioned improvements to scalac itself.
So, building only modified files is pretty much out of the question. Aside from SDT, the only tool I know of which even tries this is SBT (Simple Build Tool). It uses a compiler plugin to track files as they are compiled and query the dependency graph computed by the compiler itself. In practice, this yields about a 50% improvement over the recompile-the-world approach. Once again, this is a hack to get around deficiencies in pre-2.8.0 scalac.
The good news is that reasonably fast compilation is still achievable even without worrying about change detection. FSC uses the same technology (ooh, that sounded so "Charlie Eppes") that Eclipse SDT uses to implement fast incremental compilation. In short, it's pretty snappy.
Personally, I use Apache Buildr. Its configuration is significantly cleaner than either Maven's or SBT's and its startup time is orders of magnitude less (when running under MRI). It integrates with FSC and attempts to do some basic change detection on its own (fairly primitive). It also has auto-magical support for the major Scala test frameworks (ScalaTest, ScalaCheck and Specs) as well as support for joint compilation with Java sources and IDE meta generation for IntelliJ and Eclipse. Oh, and it supports all of Maven's features (dependency resolution, etc) and then some. I'm even working on an extension which would allow interactive shell support integrated with JavaRebel and supporting several shell providers (Scala, JIRB, Clojure REPL, etc). It's not ready for the SVN yet, but I'll commit once it's ready (possibly in time for 1.3.5).
As you can see, I'm very firmly of the opinion that Buildr is the best Scala build tool out there. Its documentation is a little spotty where Scala is concerned, but that's because everything is so straightforward that it's hard to document without feeling verbose. You can always check out one of my GitHub repositories for examples. Good luck!
Have you looked at Intellij IDEA and its Scala integration ? Intellij has a loyal (fanatical?) following amongst Java developers, so you may find this is appropriate for your needs.
Am also quite frustrated with the scala plugin on Eclipse and I can add a few more problems to the list:
auto-complete only works some of the time
the debugger doesn't work properly (especially when trying to debug scala xml)
the debugger forgets breakpoints
'go to definition' doesn't work more often than not.
I'm glad to hear that Buildr sounds like a better alternative (on the build front anyhow), I'll give that a try - thanks!
If you use Emacs, I think Ensime is a pretty good IDE. I think at the time writing, Ensime is the only IDE that will give you fast and accurate autocompletion on both Scala and Java objects, including implicit conversions.
There's code browsing support using Speedbar, code templates using the excellent Yasnippet, and code completion menu using Autocomplete. These are all very modern, actively maintained Emacs packages. There's also out of the box incremental building support for Maven and SBT.
There's a lot more in there such as interactive debugging, refactoring, and the Scala interpreter in an inferior process. All the things you want in a modern IDE for Scala is already there in Ensime. Highly recommended for Emacsens.
For the reasons of completeness, I have to say that there is also Pants -- the build tool that in use in Twitter (one of the early scala adopters)
The main difference it that it is intended not only for scala (and written in python, by the way) and is modeled after google build system.
It's not so bloated as sbt, so for the freshmans it's much simplier, but I've never heard about Pants usage outside of twitter and foursquare.
If you scared of SBT, maybe another no-so-popular build tool, ABT, could be an alternative for you?
I went down the same road, and here is where I am at:
- After some initial investigation, I dropped Kate. I love to use it for most things, but when it came to things like defining tab completions, I found it sorely lacking. I would recommend that you look into gedit instead, which is much more robust for Scala development
- With gedit as my editor, I use SBT and have found it to be a great build tool. I can put it into a 'test' mode where when any code changes it recompiles the relevant files and runs my test suite. This has been an extremely effective way to work.
I have not taken a look at Buildr yet. I would like to say that I will, but honestly with SBT at my disposal I don't really have a compelling need to look at another build tool.
If you want to use Eclipse, but build the project using sbt, and still be able to debug, take a look at this post here:
zikaprog.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/scala-eclipse-sbt-and-debugging/
It also can be applied to builders other than sbt.
The latest version of the Maven Scala plugin supports Zinc/Nailgun for faster start times and faster incremental builds. See Zinc and Incremental Compilation.