RE: [dash-dev] Monkey and Java 6 Scripting

[Ingo Muschenetz <ingo@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Sam,

Adding a new language to Monkey is quite easy--basically you provide a wrapper to the scripting engine, and a small parser for the metadata comments at the top. We've discussed internally using the native Java 6 support as it would remove the need to ship Rhino for those who already have it.

Using the Java 6 scripting support more broadly, I guess instead of writing a separate extension for each language, you'd write a single wrapper that used the Java 6 ScriptEngineManager to give you the proper scripting engine for a particular type of file? Was this along the lines of what you were thinking?

Best,
Ingo

-----Original Message-----
From: dash-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:dash-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Sam Ellis
Sent: Tuesday, October 02, 2007 1:58 PM
To: dash-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [dash-dev] Monkey and Java 6 Scripting

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?


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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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