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.
• Add autocompletion
• Add autoformatting / indentation
• Template mechanism + Toggeling
• Add Plugins for the external binaries ApCoCoA uses
• Make a downloadable Eclipse+ApCoCoA bundle
• Create splash screen and icons

ToDos

• Show documentation when hovering over functions
• Adapt syntax coloring and make it configurable in the preferences
• Provide an outline of the files being edited
• Complete ApCoCoA perspective (open two consoles, set console preferences like "Show...when...changes")
• 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
• Improve JUnit framework
• Provide a seperate plugin zip file
• Let user switch interactive behaviour of the current ApCoCoA editor window
• Provide a view on the history
• Hint / error message, when in interactive mode and apcocoa is not started
• Open files not in the workspace
• Add packages-representation node to the project view (make packages files available easily)
• Error annotation, link the error message to the corresponding part in the editor
• Send only the selected part of the editor window to the interpreter
• Add cheat sheets.
• Search the system PATH for already installed ApCoCoA
• Beautify autocompletion presentation
• Add autocompletion icons
• Use dltk for communication with cocoa processor
• "Save output as"

Done

• Move project from CVS to subversion (2009-04-03)

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 the ApCoCoA Plug-ins for Eclipse within Eclipse

• Get Eclipse for RCP/Plug-in Developers from [1]. If you also develop ApCoCoALib, install the CDT features on top of it.
• Create a new workspace directory (e.g. moccha). This will be convenient since you will have several plug-ins open to learn from (see below).
• Install the Subclipse Plug-in by adding the site http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.4.x under Help > Software Updates... > Available Software.
• Using the repository from svn://apcocoa.org/, check out the following directories under Moccha (File > New > Other... > SVN > Checkout Projects from SVN):
  • Moccha/org.apcocoa/trunk (the feature we deliver)
  • Moccha/org.apcocoa.eclipse/trunk (the plug-in related Java sources)
  • Moccha/org.apcocoa.eclipse.doc/trunk (the HTML documentation plug-in)
• 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.

Issues with Eclipse

There is this whole discussion concerning if to put the project specific .*-files under version control or not. We decided to put them under version control in order to have a consistent build process across the team. I will add some more comments on the pros and cons of the different approaches and in particular our experience as the project goes on.

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");

Using the Eclipse Help System for ApCoCoA Help

• http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-echelp/

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

Preparing a new release

• Get the delta pack for cross-platform building http://update.eclipse.org/downloads/drops/R-3.4.2-200902111700/index.php#DeltaPack