Revision as of 21:09, 28 March 2012

Eclipse Scripting BoF session at EclipseCon 2012

Doing easy customizations and automation of common workflows is the bread-and-butter of pretty much every advanced editor such as Emacs, vi, Slickedit, Textmate or others. Office products such as LibreOffice or the Microsoft suite provide scripting and macro recording as essential capabilities for easy extension. JTAG debuggers such as Lauterbach Trace32 or Greenhills MULTI are even built around scripting.

But what about Eclipse ? What happened to Monkey, Command Shell and all the other ideas ?

Come join us for a BoF at EclipseCon 2012 if you care about making it easy to customize an Eclipse IDE.

Date:	Wed Mar 28, 2012
Time:	7.30pm - 8.30pm (HTML | iCal)
Room:	Reston Suites A Regency Ballroom B

All are invited, even if you didn't sign up :).

Attendees and Interests

• Martin Oberhuber (Wind River): What is the current state of scripting, why is it so fragmented, and how can we unify it ?
• Anna Dushistova
• Leo Treggiari
• Jeffrey Hiller
• Mohamed Hussein
• Andrew Eisenberg

Notes

• Existing Scripting
  • EclipseMonkey (archived)
  • Groovy Monkey
  • xored Q7 - ECL
  • TOPCASED
  • GroovyEclipse (Editor scripting)
  • DLTK - Console for running scripts
  • Jython
  • Javascript / Rhino engine
  • BeanScripting foundation for WebSphere
  • Scala etc in plugins
  • Aptana: Rubles
  • Emacs+
  • Mohammed's old extension point infrastructure

• Properties of usable scripting
  • Can be pretty pragmatic (scripts don't live too long)
    • But if it's good it's going to remain ... people WILL leverage it for bigger things
  • Should be self-documenting ("help")
    • Eclipse Monkey was too hard to learn how to write somethign
  • Should have escape mechanism into full Eclipse API's
    • Ideally, new DOM / Simple API can be created inside the scripting language(s)
  • Easy to share / deploy scripts (Monkey model is good)

• Script WHAT
  • Simple automation: Open a View, Create a Project

• Script HOW
  • Button / Menu inside IDE
  • Testcase from outside
  • Connect to running instance

• Automated Recording
  • Not perfect, but may help finding ID's etc.
  • SWTBot
  • Jubula
  • WindowTester

• Properties of the Scripts
  • Allow multiple languages (eg those supported by JRE 6: JavaScript, Pyhton/Jython, Groovy, ...)

• Use-Cases
  • eg find-replace certain things in certain files
  • Simple automation eg Open a View
  • Create a Project with certain properties, add some files / folders
  • Editor Macros

Next Steps

• Get in touch with more interested parties
• Set up a Forum or Mailing list
• Find a candidate
• Collect very concrete use-cases