On 4/20/2015 2:44 PM, Mark Murphy/STAR BASE Consulting Inc. wrote:
Buck, have you tried any of the Rexx plugins for eclipse? I just googled "rexx eclipse" and got a decent list of plugins, one looks as recent as 2013.
The problem isn't the language that is used for scripting as much as the
way the script interacts with RDi. More specifically, with Lpex. The
old Code/400 Lpex had public, published hooks that both Rexx and Java
were able to easily tap into. By easily, I mean that I could cycle
through open tabs with one Rexx operation: godoc next.
The RDi Lpex is built on Eclipse. That's not a mere marketing ploy;
Eclipse classes are built with many, many, many Java Interfaces. Each
Interface needs to be implemented with a concrete class. Many of those
implementations come with Eclipse, but they are so generic that they
aren't helpful. In that case, you, the plug-in developer / script
writer, need to write your own implementing class.
Which is OK enough, but trying to look up what Interface performs what
function isn't exactly the easiest in the world. And then there's all
the Eclipse-required prerequisite housekeeping that needs to be done
before you even get to writing the code you want to do something useful.
Here's a bit of code that demonstrates this:
https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/forums/html/topic?id=77777777-0000-0000-0000-000014826506
Returning to my Rexx example of godoc next, it was really hard to find
the Eclipse equivalent, but I guessed it was in IWorkbenchPage, because,
why not? It looks like if I used IWorkbenchPage.getEditorReferences()
to create an array of IEditorReference, I could iterate through them one
at a time with openEditor(). I think? In any event, it's certainly
much more work than godoc next.
To answer your question then, even if NetRexx were to load on RDi 9/1
(it won't) and I could directly access the Java bits and bobs inside
Eclipse, it would still be a lot more work than I had to go through with
Code/400. Is it possible that I could climb the learning curve? Sure,
if I did it every day, but that's not going to happen, and so I will
probably never learn enough Eclipse internals to be able to do much
useful work, because each new 'thing' I want to do will be so separated
in time that finding all the references will be more tiresome than
simply typing it by hand, scripting it with Code or even using grep/sed
on a text file.
midrange.com
