Perlipse Development

happy 2012

2012-01-20T11:35:00.001-05:00

greetings and salutations in the year 2012! after a very, very long hiatus, development work on perlipse has resumed.

stay tuned for further updates!

news from the dead

2009-06-01T16:13:00.001-04:00

i realize it's been a while since any kind of update has been posted, and unfortunately it may be a little while longer before one is again. aside from having a crazy summer concert tour planned, i've had a couple other events occur in my life recently that have left me little time for anything else. but fear not, i am committed to continuing work on this project. once i return from bonnaroo things should calm down a bit, leaving me more time to focus my attention here.

any antlr experts out there?

2009-03-24T12:45:00.001-04:00

i'm having some difficulties getting my token building logic correct, anyone able to provide some assistance?

and now the news you've been waiting for

2009-03-16T21:47:00.002-04:00

*drum roll*

i am pleased to announce that a new source parser implementation has been created. i don't want to give too much away just yet incase it all blows up in my face - and it's 24 night, but all initial tests look good.

stay tuned!

'perl -c' support, round one

2009-03-04T12:52:00.002-05:00

basic support for compiling source code via the interpreter and reporting errors back in the gui has been added. check out the screen shot below.

i'm not sure why the problem marker isn't displaying in the outline view, which is something i'll have to investigate. the next step will be to add preference support so things like warnings and taint mode and be turned on and off.

in other news, i've encountered an annoying bug that causes any folded code that falls within the definition of a SourceModule to be quickly expanded and then refolded any time a save operation has been performed. i can't seem to replicate this issue in any of the other dltk plugins (except for python) so tracking down the problem should prove to be an aggravating experience. :)

code folding improvements

2009-02-11T15:59:00.001-05:00

after suffering many bouts of motivational deficiencies and general laziness on my part, i've gotten my act together and have finished off the code folding improvements i had been working on. here are a couple of screen shots of the new preference pages:

and here's an action shot of the editor:

it should be noted that source code folding is only going to work if you're using the experimental ppi parser. one of these days i swear i'm going to do something about the overall parser situation, but unfortunately that day is not today.

0.9.8 released

2008-11-19T15:18:00.002-05:00

hot off the compiler i present to you perlipse 0.9.8. some items of interest:

java 1.5 is now required
todo task tags
improved syntax highlighting
detail formatters for debugging

head on over to the project page for more details.

syntax highlighting improvements

2008-11-19T12:50:00.002-05:00

syntax highlighting improvements have landed, here's a list things that can now be highlighted:

keywords, barewords, and file handles
variables (arrays, hashes, scalars)
quote like/regular expression operators
package/subroutine name declarations

here's a quick screen shot of the highlighting in action:

i'm sure there are a plethora of edge cases that have yet to be discovered, so please feel free to file a bug report should you encounter one.

woo! first bug report

2008-11-06T17:37:00.003-05:00

well, it looks like there are people actually trying this thing out, as i received my first bug report.

in other news, project specific task tag support has been added:

and syntax validation (perl -c) is starting to come to life:

although there's still a lot of ground to be covered in that area.

status update

2008-09-29T21:52:00.001-04:00

it's been quite a while since i've posted anything... development continues, although at a much slower pace then i would like. blame life, the day job, general laziness, <insert excuse here>, although i'm still feeling somewhat lazy when it comes to blog posts, so this will be quick... things recently done: * initial task tag support * variable detail formatters things on the horizon: * compiling script resources on save (perl -c) * documentation hovers * partition/color scanner improvements stay tuned...

odds and ends

2008-07-20T14:27:00.001-04:00

i've been meaning to post this for quite some time, but have been lazy. news on new functionality and maybe a quick howto for adding that support to your plugin on the way. - remote breakpoint support has been added to the core, huzzah! - here's a great video that displays some of the features of the 0.95 release of the dltk using the tcl plugin. the topics discussed in the 'code editor/navigation/assist' sections don't all apply to perlipse yet, but some day...

the saga continues...

2008-06-24T22:38:00.001-04:00

with the 0.9.7 release behind us (well, me), i've decided to refocus my efforts on getting the remote breakpoint support working. i've grown tired of the debugging hell i have to suffer at the day job. just to recap the issue: if a resource from a remote debugging session is mapped back into the local workspace, there is a chance the location of that resource on the remote host does not match that of the local. if the location paths don't match, the debugging engine can't find the breakpoint. i thought i could get around this using marker data to swap out the paths right before the breakpoint is set, and we all know what happened to thought... that approach doesn't work for 'deferred' breakpoints (and potentially a bunch of other scenarios i came up with, but don't care to elaborate on), which makes debugging an embedded application quite hard. i've got a couple other ideas on where to go next, but that's another post, i'm tired. p.s. it looks like some of you are attempting to give the parser a whirl. i know it needs a lot of help, but i would like to hear about people's experiences thus far, especially on the installation part.

0.9.7 released

2008-06-22T18:09:00.002-04:00

just in time for the ganymede release, i give you perlipse 0.9.7. check out the project page for more details. this release also introduces the experimental ppi parser i've been working on - and when i say experimental, i mean experimental, so expect things not to work properly or at all in some cases. it should also be noted that performance becomes notably worse for larger and more complex scripts/modules, so mileage will vary at this point. here's a screen shot of a simple module in the editor with its outline view displayed and the $foo variable selected in both.

check out the installation notes for how to get up and running with the parser.

quick update

2008-06-03T21:33:00.001-04:00

it's been a while since i've posted something, but rest assured, work still continues however progress is slow due to work load at the day job, warmer weather activities, and some minor laziness. :) the next release will occur shortly after the 0.9.5 dltk release, hopefully along with the extremely experimental parser implementation.

huzzah!

2008-04-01T22:43:00.001-04:00

there's still some work to be done, but i just finished adding support to select which installed interpreter should be used to execute the source parser script.

coupled with a recent upload to cpan, look what works under windows now:

that's right - a working parser under cygwin's perl. huzzah!

0.9.6 released

2008-03-15T15:04:00.001-04:00

i'm happy to announce that perlipse 0.9.6 (0.9.5 was never publicly released) is now available. you will need to install the 2008.03.14 dltk integration build for things to work properly, but i'd imagine that if you're trying this plugin out, you're willing to live on the edge. check out the project page for installation instructions. i've come to the conclusion that this plugin is never really going to be useful with some kind of source parser, and time is going to be spent in that area. i may also go back and see what can be done about the remote debugging limitations because having this working would be quite beneficial for some of my current day job tasks.

search added

2008-03-09T19:17:00.001-04:00

it's been a busy past few days :) search support has been added:

although it's only really useful with a working parser implementation, and i haven't released one of those yet. :) i enabled this for the dltk python plugin as well, but it doesn't seem to work for some reason. i think there is an issue with how the source files are being indexed, but that could be incorrect. i'm surprised the perl implementation worked more or less 'out of the box. edit: helps to use the right images :)

template support

2008-03-09T18:19:00.001-04:00

i've never really used this functionality much, but it was pretty easy to do, and since i have delayed my venture into common navigator space (more on that later, maybe...for now it's in a holding pattern) i've decided to start adding functionality to make the editor portion more useful.

one note about the shebang template support - it only works correctly if you use it on a blank line (just invoke the auto complete sequence for the window to appear). see here if you're interested in the details. if anyone wants to contribute templates, let me know. p.s. the dltk python plugin has template support now as well.

debugging engine logging support

2008-03-09T18:05:00.001-04:00

now you can get logging information from the active state debugging engine - woohoo!

variable display during debugging

2008-02-25T09:58:00.001-05:00

i finished working on allowing the ability for each dltk language to be able to toggle the display of variables in the debug 'Variables' view last night. here's a shot of just 'local' variable display:

and here's a shot of 'global' and 'local' variables enabled.

all the other dltk language categories have similar menu entries. as part of this implementation, i switched over to using commands, handlers, and the org.eclipse.ui.menus extension to add the menu entries. one thing i have noticed with this change over is the 'toggled' state of the menu item is not correctly set the first time the menu appears. i have implemented the IElementUpdater interface, but that does not help fix this issue. here's a shot of the menu when it's first displayed (yes, the settings are all enabled):

if i close the 'Variables' view and re-open it, the menu appears correctly with all entries 'checked' - the updateElement method from the IElementUpdater interface is called when the view is re-openned.

either i'm missing something or there is a regression/bug in the way the org.eclipse.ui.menus extension works because you can set the 'toggled' state if you're using an IAction. i did a bunch of searching for this yesterday and didn't have any luck - if anyone out there could shed some light on this, it would be much appreciated. in the mean time, based upon some feedback i received, i think my next task will be investigating what needs to be done to integrate with the 'Project Explorer' view.

the little things

2008-02-23T19:49:00.001-05:00

i just committed a subtle change to the script explorer view. can you spot it?

in case you can't, the view is now using a language specific package delimiter instead of the '/' that was originally being shown. i have to admit that minor cosmetic issue had been bothering me for quite some time and i finally decided to track it down to fix. sometimes it's the little things in life...

back in the saddle

2008-02-21T11:50:00.001-05:00

after an extended period of laziness, i've finished implementing language, project, and now launch specific debugging preferences for dbgp logging and breaking on the first line of executable code. here's a screenshot of the a debugging launch configuration.

unfortunately, i wasn't able to finish the work on the variable display options, however i will be circling back to finish that up in the near future. on a separate note, i've shown the javascript implementation a little love and brought its debugger preferences inline everyone else.

happy days :)

calling all users

2008-01-22T21:57:00.001-05:00

if you're one of the 150 people that has downloaded version 0.9.4, i'd love to hear any sordid details you may have about its usage.

debugging options

2008-01-22T21:52:00.001-05:00

happy belated new year all! work on the project continues, although at a slightly slower pace due to a heavier work load at the day job lately and some general laziness on my part, but no longer! :) i just finished the ui work to push down some debugging engine settings so they can be managed on a per language/project basis. the current implementation exposes these options at a 'global' level, which can become annoying if you have more then one dltk implementation installed, here are some screen shots of the new interface: global settings:

perlipse settings:

the next step will be to have the engine respect the language/project specific settings.

holiday attention spans

2007-12-25T21:30:00.001-05:00

what started out as a simple goal to respect project specific source parser settings has grown into something slightly more spastic (note to self: add ritalin to next year's wish list). along the way i sidetracked myself into investigating how to enable comment toggling and other associated editor actions. the biggest hurdle there is trying to understand how to programatically add items to the context menu and have them appear where i want. it looks like a new menu extension point (org.eclipse.ui.menus) was added in eclipse 3.3 to replace the existing interfaces currently in use, although i'm not sure if it makes sense to move towards that model right now, the jdt hasn't done it yet, but there's nothing wrong with attempting to be a trend setter. i still have to finish up with the project specific source parser items, and i have a strong suspicion that i'll continue to side track myself with other odds and ends as that work continues. hope everyone had a merry christmas!