Groovy seems to fix a lot of the things I dislike about Java, and I was wondering if it would be possible to actually write an Eclipse plugin in Groovy instead of Java.
Does anyone know if this is possible, and if so how to go about it?
I've just found a blog entry which says it's not officially supported but is actually possible.
Not yet tested to see if it works, but it seems promising:
Writing Eclipse plugins with Groovy, by Jörn Dinkla
#Peter, I do not think that the blog post you linked to is complete or if it will really work. It is pointing to the old version of Groovy-Eclipse, which is no longer supported and is out of date.
Yes. It is possible to create your own plugins in Groovy.
First, install the Groovy-Eclipse plugin from here:
http://dist.codehaus.org/groovy/distributions/greclipse/snapshot/e3.7/
Then you can create a new plugin project and add the Groovy Nature.
Remove the Groovy Libraries classpath container
Instead, add the org.codehause.groovy as a required bundle
Create your Groovy code as normal
Now, the tricky part is exporting the plugin using PDE. See this blog post for how to do that: http://contraptionsforprogramming.blogspot.com/2010/08/groovy-pde-redux.html
One important thing to note is that you will need at least one Java file in your project for PDE to compile anything, It can be a dummy, empty file (this is a bug that has not yet been fixed).
Rejoice!
As an example, here is the codenarc Eclipse plugin that was written completely in Groovy:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/codenarceclipse/
You can also use JRuby, or Javascript ...
JAM Circle is a great example showing how to make great use of a scripting language in an Eclipse plugin, by allowing the end user to write his own actions and load them at runtime.
There's a proxy-like plugin that allows you to implement the plugin virtually in any language that supports JSR223 (javax.scripting)
Related
I'm using Netbeans IDE. It's quite annoying and it's a cause of errors the import of Java packages and/or classes that are not provided by Codename One. (Codename One use its own implementation of a subset of Java8 and it cannot support the full Java API).
For example, sometimes Netbeans imports automatically wrong packages (such as "java.awt.BorderLayout" instead of "com.codename1.ui.layouts.BorderLayout"), other times it shows me methods and Javadocs that are not available in Codename One.
Is it possible to force Netbeans to show me only packages, classes, methods and javadocs that are supported by Codename One? It could be useful to avoid errors.
We'd love to but unfortunately the only way NetBeans allows you to do that is if you build your own Java language package. That's what some other plugins like NBAndroid did AFAIK but when we implemented the plugin we didn't want to create something too complex.
If NetBeans supported a "bootclasspath" option for the JDK it would have solved everything. It does have support for plugging in an alternative JDK which can be a micro-profile but because we don't comply with the micro-profile spec I'm not sure if that will work.
At times, NetBeans suggests to import more than one package from the drop-down list. When you check carefully before pressing ENTER this might avoid importing the wrong package.
I use NetBeans for quite a while with CN1 and faced the same problem at the beginning.
In order to modify an eclipse plugin, what are the steps to find its editable code ?
I read and debug source provided with eclipse distribution but to try a fix in org.eclipse.jdt.internal.corext.codemanipulation behavior I need to make it editable.
Well, the source repository is available at eclipse.org, the plugin compiled with the source should be available from the standard eclipse update site.
I'm guessing you are considering changing the source, recompiling and using your plugin instead of the standard one? There is a different way to change functionality, its with fragments. For example, look at a question I asked earlier, follow the links in my text and Andrews answer for more information.
I'm using JavaCC to create a language plugin for Eclipse and I wanted to know if there are any stable language IDEs for Eclipse that use JavaCC to create their AST representations and Lexer/Parser files. Thanks.
I don't know of any stable ones, however, the Eclipse IMP project supports creating IDE using any parser generator. Sadly, the project does not seem especially active (the last release is almost a year old), and documentation is a bit scarce.
However, it features a half-working example (crated with LPG), that I believe it could be adapted for JavaCC as well.
I tried a Google search for
"import org.eclipse" "import org.javacc"
hoping to find a web page with the text of a .java file from some plugin that included both. No results came up. Nonetheless there may well be a plugin that uses JavaCC, but completely segregates the code that depends on JavaCC from code that depends on Eclipse. Hmm.
I'm trying to use Google Protocol Buffers in my project and I'd like to have some tooling support from Eclipse. In particular, I want Eclipse to call protoc every time I make changes to the .proto files and then rebuild all code that depends on the generated code.
I tried to set up a Custom Builder but it keeps bugging me with errors I don't understand, most often it complains that the .proto file is not on the path given by --proto-path, which it should be by all I can tell. Also, because I use ${build_files}, Eclipse passes all changed files to the compiler (instead of those that I have configured to trigger the build).
NetBeans seems to have a protobuf-Plugin, but I can't find one for Eclipse. Is there one?
Theres a protoclipse plugin on googlecode, which is in the initial stages:
http://code.google.com/p/protoclipse/
Not sure if there is a builder, but I did find a plugin for syntax highlighting for protocol buffers.
You can define an external builder on the plugin that invokes an ant task. It is an ugly kludge, but until there is a better solution this may serve your purposes.
In practice, syntax highlighting turned out to not be that important, I hardly edit these files, and they tend to be very small. Maven and the m2eclipse plugin handle the building side of things great.
I recommend using Google's "Protocol Buffers Development Tools". It is a plugin for Eclipse that features automagic regeneration and error checking, among other things. It's available here: http://code.google.com/p/protobuf-dt/ .
While this question is close to other Eclipse plugin for working with protobuf, answers here are different.
Well, yes, if you use maven/gradle to invoke protoc (Protobuf compiler), than you may need no Eclipse plugin at all.
Colorizing editor helps for long file or with many comments. Know there are 2 editor plugins for Eclipse.
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.