How do I get support for GPB in Eclipse? - eclipse

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.

Related

Netbeans + Codename One - Avoid importing packages or classes not suitable for CN1

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.

How to compile LESS into CSS when files are saved in Eclipse

I'm developing a struts2 webapp for months now using maven to manage my dependencies and I've just discovered LESS. I have installed and configured the LESS plug-in for Eclipse but it's really annoying to right click > run as > LESS compiler every time I save the .less file due to a modification of its content or something...
The thing is that I've been researching on how to plug in grunt.js (recently discovered task runners too) into maven (as explained here) but I think it's quite hard and I wondered if somebody knew an alternative to this.
In my struts2 project I have both the front and back-end of my webapp.I know it's not the right approach and if I could start all over again I would separate them into two different projects, but now it's too late (disadvantages of the learning proccess, we're not born knowing it all).
Having said all this, how can I set up a kind of task for watching my .less files and automatically compile them into .css when saved/changed?
I also found this ant task here, but I dont really know if it's what I'm looking for.
There are a lot of Java Less compiler (see Java Compiler for Less CSS?), so you can execute one of them by your build tool (e.g. Ant - maybe you need to write a simple Java application, which use the chosen compiler).
If you use Maven (or can switch to it) to project management, then you can use one of lesscss-maven-plugin:
biz.gabrys.maven.plugins:lesscss-maven-plugin
org.lesscss:lesscss-maven-plugin
see more...
It is possible to create an ant task to compile certain .less files into CSS whenever they are modified, and more or less is what I was looking for, but grunt seems to be more flexible as you can tell it to watch all your files with .less extension and in this solution I've found you have to declare in an .xml file the .less files you want ant to watch.
This is not explicitly what I was looking for so I'll leave this question open for now as I'll keep researching on how to make this solution more dynamic and see if it is possible to avoid the fact of defining every .less source and .css target you want.
Link to solution here

IJavaProject without Eclipse Environment in JDT

I have an exported Eclipse Java Project in my server and I want to be able to compile the project and use ASTParser with JDT.
I'm able to compile the project using BatchCompiler, however it runs on console and gives me PrintWriters instead of an array of problems and errors. Also I want to be able to use proposals in Eclipse and BatchCompiler didn't built for this purpose.
Therefore I tried to use ASTParser, it can be used with either char[] or ICompilationUnit. CompletionProposalCollector and org.eclipse.jdt.internal.compiler.Compiler.Compiler needs ICompilationUnit so I have to create an ICompilationUnit which only can be created by an IJavaProject (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10773282/2012/eclipse_workspace.pdf) in order to be able to use these features.
It seems the only way to create IJavaProject is to use ResourcesPlugin.getWorkspace(), however it returns java.lang.IllegalStateException: Workspace is closed. on my computer and it seems the reason is that the program that I coded is not an Eclipse plug-in.
Is there any way to create IJavaProject without Eclipse environment?
From the comments, it looks like you are trying to do more than just parsing, you actually want to get some form of content assist.
I'm afraid that you're asking for too much. There is no simple way to get the power and flexibility of JDT outside of a running Eclipse instance (believe me, I've tried). There's no simple way, but if you are brave and strong willed, you can one of try following:
Run a headless Eclipse on your server that works on top of an actual workspace. This would be the easiest to implement, but would be the most resource intensive and least flexible way of doing things.
Use the jdt core jar, and create alternate implementations of the IResource hierarchy, and the parts of JFace that are used by the the parser and the CompletionEngine. This would likely be the most feature-rich way to go, but also the most brittle. I can't guarantee that this would work as you may need to create some very complex stubs for internal Eclipse non-API classes.
Avoid the CompletionEngine and the ASTParser entirely and just use the batch compiler. You would then need to provide an alternate implementation of org.eclipse.jdt.internal.compiler.env.INameEnvironment. This implementation would be able to find types, files, and compilation units in your actual project structure. You'd need to reimplement support for content assist, but this would most likely work reasonably well.
I am actually fairly interested in doing something like this (but I lack the time to do it). If you are seriously considering creating a headless JDT that can run on a server, feel free to ask for more information. I am quite familiar with JDT internals.
I've had a similar problem. Here is how to use ASTParser without Eclipse (it just needs the core JDT JAR on the classpath): http://blog.pdark.de/2010/11/05/using-eclipse-to-parse-java-code/

Can I write Eclipse plugins using Groovy?

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)

Are there any Eclipse language IDEs -plugins- that use JavaCC?

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.