On Thu, Apr 9, 2015 at 9:37 AM, Buck Calabro <kc2hiz@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
There was a project called Eclipse Monkey which used Javascript (for
one) to script Eclipse internals. It died out due to lack of interest.
I am surprised that the Monkey project died out (but I accept that it
has; the official Eclipse wiki page for it has been archived, and its
last timestamp was 2009).
Lack of interest? Really? To me, this suggests one or more of the
following: (1) Eclipse is so full-featured that few people need
anything more than what's already included; (2) Eclipse is so mature
that anything anyone could want to add has already been built as a
"proper" plug-in; (3) Eclipse users are dominated by unimaginative
"drone" programmers who don't have the instinct to keep looking for
greater automation or better features.
But, even if all of those are true, the Eclipse user base is huge. It
seems implausible to me that there wouldn't be enough demand for
scriptability, even if it only comes from a tiny fraction of the
Eclipse community.
So I did a bit of Googling and found at least a few promising
projects. The frontrunner by a long shot has to be EASE, which is the
Eclipse Advanced Scripting Environment, released just last year
(2014):
https://eclipse.org/ease/
If you dig around enough, you can find signs that it is at least in
part built on the work done for Monkey.
Some other things I found are either older (not as old as Monkey, but
not as new as EASE) or more limited in scope (macro facility, but not
"full-fledged, general-purpose scripting"):
http://eclipsescript.org/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/practicalmacro/
So, maybe scripting for Eclipse was dead, but it's back.
John Y.
midrange.com
