Eclipse plugin advances

[Marc van Woerkom]

> I see there's not been any activity at the erlide.sf.net project for  
> quite a while.

It is not lack of interest!

Eclipse is the first development environment since Emacs that I like very
much.
I think it is one very good way to realize a modern graphical style Erlang  
IDE.

My reasons for slow progress are

a) Eclipse is huge

I still do not understand its architecture well enough
and if there is a specific way how a good eclipse IDE for a language
should get implement. What is there as open source is the JDT
or J2SE development and that CDT for C++ development, I still
hope to learn from those.

Since November I am grinding through some books that teach
eclipse internals and especially plugin development
- Gamma/Beck: Contributing through eclipse
- Shavor et al: eclipse (great intro on use, also plugin dev)
- Budinsky et al: eclipse modeling frame work (e.g. code generation  
support)

b) economic pressure

I lost my developer job last May, a position where I had to compete already
with 200 other candidates. The economy here in Germany seems recovering  
slightly,
but it had no effect on the job market yet and in a very typical German way
they insist on a finished degree now. Thus 6+ years work experience
aren't enough anymore to get a job (but just a degree without 2+ years is
not enough too).
That's why I am focussing to finish a degree as fast as possible, and it
seems I can do that this autumn.
So my free time is not as much as it used to be. :)

BTW one of my exams was on real time systems, where I learned a bit
of PEARL (not perl) which is different from Erlang but also another
industrial way to handle similiar topics.

c) Erlang is huge as well

But that depresses me a lot less than a) and b)


> I took the JavaEditor example plugin and am working my way through  
> making it handle Erlang - so far syntax highlighting works 60% and it  
> also has some other useless features.

I feel guilty to strive for a great solution, which has the danger
of not materializing.

But I have nothing against just starting with something and improving
that if possible. I hope Eric sees this the same wy.


> I think it would be a good idea not to sit on the code, and let others
> contribute too. :-)

Yes.


> For this, I'd need to become a developer - Eric or Marc, could you  
> arrange for
> that? My user id is 8024, login name 'vladdu'.

I do that in a moment.

Regards,
Marc