ApCoCoA-1:Eclipse GUI

The Eclipse GUI Project: Goal of the Project

The overall goal of the project can be described as follows:

 To create a state of the art, platform independent Graphical User Interface for faster CoCoAL program and prototype development.

Project Plan

Phase 1: Introduce a comfortable Editor covering as much features as provided by the Emacs interface.

Currently in Progress

• Test if Xtext is suitable for generating a comfortable CoCoA Language editor.

Current ToDos

• Add autocompletion
• Add autoformatting / indentation
• Show documentation when hovering over functions
• Adapt syntax coloring and make it configurable in the preferences
• Provide an outline of the files being edited
• Completing ApCoCoA perspective
• Refactor console views and communication to CoCoA process (relate to Eclipse launching mechanism)
• Wishlist: Parsing of the CoCoA instream (the results) to provide flexible representation of the results
• Add Plugins for the external binaries ApCoCoA uses
• Improve JUnit framework
• Move project from CVS to subversion
• Make a downloadable Eclipse+ApCoCoA bundle
• Provide a seperate plugin zip file
• Let user switch interactive behaviour of the current ApCoCoA editor window
• Provide a view on the history

Scratchpad

Quick and dirty notes for myself, thought as a basis for extending to a proper developer documentation ....

General Links

• http://help.eclipse.org/ganymede/index.jsp
• http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-UI-Guidelines/Index.html and http://wiki.eclipse.org/User_Interface_Guidelines
• http://blog.eclipse-tips.com/
• http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Eclipse_FAQs

Developing Plugins for Eclipse within Eclipse

• Use for RCP/Plug-in Developers
• You can browse the code of other plugins (which is a great way to learn to know the Eclipse internals) as follows:
  • In the Eclipse package explorer: Right click > Import...
  • Plug-in development > Plug-ins and Fragments. Next.
  • Select 'Binary projects with linked content' in the 'Import As' section. This is a resource friendly way to import the Plug-in code. Next.
  • Select the plugins you would like to explore and browse. Finish.

Commands

Examples in our GUI: Starting external ApCoCoA process, sending CoCoAL code to esternal ApCoCoA process, history forward/back, starting Server.

To add a command, extend these extension points in the plugin.xml:

• org.eclipse.ui.commands: here just an ID together with other attributes (name, category,...) for a certain command is defined.
• org.eclipse.ui.handlers: this is the link between the command ID and an actual handler, ie. a class that does something when the command is called. It is possible to implement more than one handler to a certain command and to determine certain conditions when to use which handler (elements activeWhen and enabledWhen
• org.eclipse.ui.menues: here the actual visible menu and toolbar contributions are defined along with declarations, when they are visible, eg. they are visible when, say, an editor "is in a certain context".
• org.eclipse.ui.contexts: this defines a context which is referenced by the visibility check of the menus, toolbars,... The context is set by the following code snippet in the class ApCoCoAEditor.

 IContextService contextService = (IContextService) getSite().getService(IContextService.class);
 contextService.activateContext("org.apcocoa.eclipse.contexts.ApCoCoA");

Links

• Good starting point: http://richclientplatform.blogspot.com/2007/07/new-menu-contribution-extension.html

Just for redundancy, the previous link mentions among others the following links:

• http://wiki.eclipse.org/Command_Core_Expressions
• http://wiki.eclipse.org/Menu_Contributions
• http://wiki.eclipse.org/Platform_Command_Framework