RE: [pde-dev] Creating a Language Support project

["Konstantin Komissarchik" <konstantin.komissarchik@xxxxxxxxxx>]

The first thing to understand is what makes “project type” in Eclipse. The core Eclipse resources framework has this concept of “natures” which are basically flags on a project. Any interesting project will have a number of natures associated with it. You can see these in project metadata if you look at the .project file. Most of the project creation wizards in Eclipse reduce roughly to these steps: (a) create a blank project, (b) assign the project some natures, and (c) set other metadata and write any relevant content into project.

 

There is a pretty good article that talks about natures and builders together. You will need to know about both to implement your language support.

 

http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-Builders/builders.html

 

Of course, all the cool kids play with “facets” rather than “natures” these days. While natures can only be manipulated at API level by project wizards and the like, facets are visible and can be manipulated by the end users. This makes it easy to enable particular technology in existing projects (especially projects that you didn’t create).  You can read more about facets in the following article:

 

http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-BuildingProjectFacets/tutorial.html

 

The facets technology is currently part of the Eclipse Web Tools Platform, but is in the process of being extracted into a separate project to make wider reuse easier.

 

http://www.eclipse.org/proposals/fproj/

http://www.eclipse.org/fproj/  (just created, more content to come soon)

 

- Konstantin

 

 

From: pde-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:pde-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Tyler Kocheran
Sent: Wednesday, December 17, 2008 1:10 PM
To: pde-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [pde-dev] Creating a Language Support project

 

Hello Eclipse PDE World!
I'm interested in building an Eclipse plugin to support a language (the language isn't really important). I understand the concepts of views and editors in Eclipse, but all of the documentation that I've looked at so far has been extremely vague on developing a type of project. For example, how would I create my own "{Language} Project" like the "Java Project" template? I understand a little about wizards, but it seems that creating a project is beyond the scope of just a simple wizard that creates it. Files can be and usually are associated with a project, validation is associated with a project, etc. How do I do this? What extensions do I have to make?

 - TK

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