Eclipse RCP translation tool - eclipse

I am developing an Eclipse RCP application, which contains 600~ strings, translated to a couple of languages by myself.
The point is that I have to deliver it to the translation team to translate it to several languages in a couple of months, and I haven't found any translation tool for eclipse, which would help the translation team in its job. Is there any application which analyzes the file structure loading the messages.properties and bundles.properties files, and providing a UI to translate it safely.
If not, which would be the best way to perform this task?
Thanks.

Assuming you have used the NLS tools in Eclipse, you should already have the properties files containing the translated strings.
Eclipse projects are translated through an instance of the Babel server.
This is in itself an Eclipse hosted project.
The Babel server environment is a typical LAMP environment. You could try setting it up for your translators by following the instructions.
If this seems to be a lot of work for only 600 strings, it's because it is.
It is easier to use a hosted service like Amanuens or Transifex to cooperate with your translators.

Globalyzer (http://lingoport.com/globalyzer) can run as an eclipse plugin (or as a stand-alone workbench) and supports extensive internationalization activities across teams of developers and a wide variety of programming languages.

Related

Eclipse Helios plug in behemoth (I like to write behemoth on everything)

just changed from Netbeans to Eclipse just for fun (Only developer on the company, So I can code on whatever and with whatever I feel like.) That's why I liked the new version of netBeans over vim, it could load resources or plugins, I am not quite aware of their naming conventions, on demand. For example if you were working on a Grails project it would only load grails related resources.
On Eclipse I have a gazillion plugins installed. Some to emulate Netbeans functionality (Grails, JavaFX, Ruby, PHP, CSS, Python, etc.) And some others Netbeans lacks (Android, Vaadin, SpringRoo, Git and some others) But I am not sure how Eclipse handles this plug in behemothing
Does it load them on demand? Do I have to manually disable the ones I am not using? Do I have to have different installs for each language I work on? Or do I have to learn how to live with this big mess of plugins in order to have everything I need at hand??
Thank you very much for your time.
Basically Eclipse loads the plug-in codes lazily. On the other hand, the menu/toolbar contributions are loaded at the start of the platform.
If the plug-ins are written correctly, they should not interfere with each other, and the unnecessary elements should be few in the context menus.
My suggestion is to try this installation, and look for potential problems. If you have problems with the environment, only then try to identify and remove the plug-ins. But it should be ok.

using eclipse for other languages than java?

I came to know that eclipse can be used for other languages as well. But will it give the same comfort level as using java? Is there anybody who has used eclipse for other languages?
I've used Eclipse for both C/C++, Ruby, Erlang, and a few others. None of these are as tightly integrated with Eclipse as Java is, but CDT (C/C++) gives Visual Studio a good run for its money. I usually use Emacs for the other ones.
Yes, you can use Eclipse for many languages other than Java. I personally use Eclipse to code in C++, Perl, PHP, and do JavaScript as well inside of it. While it also supports plugins for connecting and executing queries against databases, I tend to prefer other options there such as Toad or Oracle SQL Developer. There are numerous other plugins to support many other languages that you can find either through the Update Manager or a simple Google search, many of which are excellent.
As a side note, if you're not using Mylyn, you're missing out.
Eclipse is used as a base for other language and tool:
for example As3 with FlashBuilder; PHP, Javascript with Aptana studio, C,Python,... with other plugins, etc...
You can found here for example some plugins for other languages.
I've used it for Javascript (jQuery): compile-time checks are a godsend to the barren lands of javascript.
For Java developement I feel most comfortable using Eclipse.
I tried using Eclipse for coding with Python. There is PyDev, an Eclipse plugin that can be used to work with the Python code in Eclipse. Though PyDev provides features like Code Completion, Syntax highlighting etc, I felt comfortable to use editors like gvim or emacs rather than Eclipse
for working with Python code. YMMV
Yes, Eclipse supports many other languages.
But you knew that already when you saw http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/
So, I guess that you are asking how well it supports them...
It is possible to have Eclipse without Java. Imagine taking that and then adding Java support. Compare that with CDT for C++ and - in my experience - they are pretty much the same.
Yes, Eclipse is slanted at Java, and I doubt that anyone will deny that, but at the same time it tries to be fair and generic and pretty much achieves it. Any few % less other language support doesn't matter when you realize that no other IDE compares.
Bottom line, whatever your language, you will be hard pushed to beat Eclipse.
And that's before I get started on the myriad plugins ...
Not only programming, debugging with Eclipse is sweet. Beside Java, the other languages I mostly work on Eclipse are PHP and Python.
While I was working on the Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP) project we often said that the Java Development Tools (JDT) were the model that we referenced for features for Web related languages. I think JDT has set the bar and many other projects that implement language specific tooling try to reach the JDT bar. I don't know that any have or that copying everything about JDT is the point but I do think the Java tools are exemplary development tools.

Generic code snippets or templates in Eclipse

I'm currently evaluating eclipse after using Textmate for all my development for many years. What I miss in Eclipse and what I can't find any solution for are some kind of generic templates:
I'm using PDT for my JavaScript and PHP development, and it supports code-templates. however , in my projects I'm writing large amounts of shell-scripts, yml-configuration-files, xml-files, gnu make scripts, etc., too. I'm writing source-documentation for all these scripts using a generic syntax (similar to robodoc) and you can save much time, when you can insert the doc-blocks using templates. however, besides PDT not all of the editor-plugins support templates.
Is there some generic way of storing code-snippets/templates in eclipse, which will work across all editor-plugins? I think it should be possible to implement such using eclipse monkey -- however, it seems development of monkey was stopped?
I'm using Eclipse 3.4.0.
If you have the web tools (WTP) plugins installed you should have a Snippets view which is an editor-independent place for collecting reusable code snippets. You can create and place your snippets in there and can separate them using 'drawers'. Double clicking or dragging a snippet item will insert it in the active editor.
The web tools user guide has a section about this view.
Why don't you try Snip2Code plugin?
It is a general purpose snippet manager platform that you can add to your Eclipse and will store your snippets on the cloud, so that you don't have to sync them when you reinstall Eclipse or move onto another machine.
http://www.snip2code.com/Static/Downloads

Developing Eclipse plugins without Java

Is it possible to create Eclipse plugins/program Eclipse RCP apps without Java? (preferably in Jython)
This will be possible in the next Eclipse major release e4:
One of the goals of e4 is to provide support for writing plugins in other languages.
The quote is from http://wiki.eclipse.org/E4/JavaScript which summarizes the current state of using javascript to implement eclipse plug-ins in e4.
This issue in eclipse's bugzilla issue #227058 also has some discussion on that, but I believe it is outdated.
I am currently not aware of activity regarding other languages.
No. An Eclipse plugin is an OSGi bundle, and that requires interacting with a variety of things that can't implemented in Jython as far as I can see.
If you want to avoid Java, you can look at other things that target the JVM, but you will have to figure if you can produce and consume the specific items needed to call the necessary things and be called in the necessary ways.
OSGi bundles may be written in other JVM languages like Scala. Eclipse plug-ins, as of now, does not support any language other than Java. The Eclipse Plug-in Development Environment heavily makes use of JDT which ties it to Java. However there are some plans I heard that plug-ins might be supported in other languages. But I don't see that coming in near future.
You can write your main code in Jython and use Java interfaces to call then from Java. Take a look at this for details. Also, I am writing a utility library (github.com/abhin4v/jywrapper) to do the same. It has very little documentation right now, but you can look at the examples provided.

Are there any user interface prototyping tools for Eclipse?

I am looking into designing new features for Eclipse-based programming tools, from the requirements/ideas perspective. To really do this quickly, I would like to sketch UI elements without having to code things -- my concern is with the concepts and ideas right now, not the possible later realization. Are there any such graphical sketching tools for Eclipse?
(on a side note, I should also note that I find Eclipse a better idea every day, in the way that you can combine partial systems from very many different sources into a single environment. It really is the future of IDEs, especially for embedded systems. It used to pretty horrible pre-Eclipse-3.0, but now it does seem to work)
WireframeSketcher is a tool that helps quickly create wireframes, mockups and prototypes for desktop, web and mobile applications. It comes both as a standalone version and as a plug-in for Eclipse IDEs. It has some distinctive features like storyboards, components, linking and vector PDF export. Among supported IDEs are are Aptana, Flash Builder, Zend Studio and Rational Application Developer.
(source: wireframesketcher.com)
Incidentally, NetBeans is known for having a really good GUI editor (Matisse), but I realize that you weren't asking about NetBeans :)
I've tried the Visual Editor Project before, but in the past it crashed my instance of Eclipse, and I haven't visited it since.
Jigloo is a new one that I'd like to try out soon.
This is really specific to Eclipse: it is the platform of choice for general IDEs today, and I am looking to sketch out extensions to it. The target programming language is more likely to be raw assembler and C than anything else -- OS, driver, system-level debug.