[dash-dev] Monkey and Java 6 Scripting

[Sam Ellis <sam.ellis@xxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I am new to this mailing list, so apologise in advance if what I'm
discussing has been posted before or contains inaccuracies.

My company has an Eclipse-based product, and I am looking at solutions to
allow our customers to perform scripting of our plug-ins. So far, Eclipse
Monkey looks very promising, and I have something useful working after only
a few hours work.

Am issue for me is that my customers probably do not want to script using
JavaScript. They would prefer something tcl-like or python-like or perl-like
(or even C/C++!). If I pick one of these languages, I will undoubtedly annoy
some subset of our customers, so what I'd like to do is support them all (or
at least more than one).

I saw some previous posts about language extensions to Monkey to allow
additional language support to be added. I have previously used the
scripting support in Java 6, so what I'm wondering is whether there are any
plans to support Java 6 scripting in Monkey. Naively, this would seem to
allow access to a wider range of languages with minimal effort.

Obviously, Java 6 is still relatively new and has not reached mainstream
yet. If Java 6 scripting were used, perhaps Monkey could still use its
built-in engines as a backup. In my case, having a dependency on Java 6 is
not a problem, as we already require this for other reasons.

I am vaguely aware that there is slightly more to adding new language
support to Monkey than just plugging in a new engine. There is probably
support for parsing the magic comments to enable the menu and keyboard
shortcuts, for example. Is comment parsing the only extra thing that a new
language extension needs to provide?

[Whilst a very neat scheme, I can't help feeling slightly yucky when I'm
editing magic comments; somehow it just doesn't seem proper. May be that's
just me.]

Anyway, has the use of Java 6 scripting been discussed before, and if so
what was the outcome?


-- 
Sam Ellis, Engineering Manager,
Product Engineering Group,                 Tel: +44 (0) 1223 400516
System Design Division,                    Fax: +44 (0) 1223 400887
ARM Ltd., 110 Fulbourn Road,               skype:armsamellis
Cambridge, CB1 9NJ                         mailto:sam.ellis@xxxxxxx



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