Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Eclipse Scripting BoF

Interested in making it easy to customize Eclipse, adding simple menus or buttons for repetitive tasks without having to code any Java ?
Ever wondered what happened to Scripting initiatives such as Eclipse Monkey, Groovy Monkey, Eclipse Command Shell and others ?
Wondering why Eclipse just doesn't provide editor macros?

Join us for a BoF on Eclipse Scripting here at EclipseCon 2012 - Wed 7.30pm at Regency Ballroom B.

We'll want to collect what approaches to scripting currently exist, why none of them didn't really gain traction so far and what we could possibly do to align and unify.

1 comment:

Pascal said...

I ran such a BOF back in 2005 showing a prototype that I had done way back (it used Rhino to access the objects). What was interesting then was that scripting all sorts of things to different people. Some wanted to script the manipulation of projects (e.g. update from CVS, build, etc), others wanted to execute a batch of commands, etc.

In my experience one the problem with the addition of scripting to Eclipse is that the provided APIs are to low level. Scripting requires a much higher level API or DOM (like the grease monkey approach taken by Ward and Bjorn) to allow for efficient scripting. Unfortunately creating this API is not a mundane task and then it needs to be maintained, kept backward compatible (well does it?), etc.

Anyway, good luck with running the BOF.