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E4/Scripting/summit08

< E4‎ | Scripting

Notes from Scripting breakout session at e4 summit, 23-May-2008

Scripting What?

  • Workbench?
  • Cheat sheets?

Use cases

  • Quick macro editor?
  • Short scripts to manipulate the IDE
  • Scripting builds -- Implementing the workspace build
  • Replace Core Expressions
  • As a part of the language-independence story
  • Simplify the process of writing new refactorings
  • Lower the barrier to entry for plugin writers
  • Avoiding class loading
  • People get to work in their favorite language
  • Throwaway programming
  • Enabling Notes developers to script the environment
  • Being able to bring in developers from other communities
  • Checkout HEAD, run perf tests, Checkout HEAD-1, run perf tests, etc. until I found the perf regressions

Questions/comments

  • Scripting =?= easy
  • Eclipse Monkey runs today against the workspace state
  • Scala is already a first class citizen in the JVM runtime. We should exploit that.
  • We also shouldn't let this capability make it impossible to use Rhino, etc...
  • Is scripting the way we call across language boundaries where the language isn't a native JVM lanaguage?
  • Important to extend Eclipse community around scripting languages
  • Why do I need scripts? Why not just inject real Java into the running workspace?
  • How do we handle threading?
  • What if the macro loops forever? Does it block the UI thread forever? What is the answer?
  • Having a DOM model representing/aggregating all model roots is useful for Java, not just for scripting.

Macros

  • Today we can write a plugin that catches commands as they go by
  • But you can't see model state
  • Workspace context might be an issue here
  • Do we record macros by screen scraping SWT events? At the level of Commands?
  • Use case: Command recording lets you find out what the commands are for writing cheat sheets
  • Challenge: Screen scraping SWT events has a hard time knowing if background jobs completed.

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