[platform-ant-dev] Eclipse, Ant Editor and Planty (was: Erich on Bug 275

[Alf.Schiefelbein@xxxxxxxx]

Hello there!

The lack of an Ant Editor and Planty has been an issue on this list
two days ago. I wrote some comments on Erich's notes and more.
(Just to make sure: The following is to be understood rather funny than
snotty.)


Erich wrote:
> I was writing an Ant script from scratch that updates an Eclipse

I was asking myself whether he already found out about Planty? ;-)
... and I read on:

> <<<Side note: I wasn't writing an Ant script from scratch since a long
time
> and
> it wasn't a happy experience. We should really have some Ant editing

I know this feeling too well :-(. Especially if you are an Ant beginner.

> support in Eclipse. Now there is Planty,

And I found out, that ... Yes, he knows about Planty. :-)

> but since it isn't CPL I couldn't
> try it out.

And this remembered me on this one evening when I was so lucky to
listen to a speech of Richard Stalllmann live. I am a big fan of his.
Unfortunately for us ordinary people there is a gap between him and
reality ... Whatever ...

> Getting Planty as an Eclipse contribution would be really nice...

Yep, I get and understand this hint.
For the other: Most of Planty's code was typed by my fingers.

> If Planty isn't contributed to Eclipse then we should try hard to
> implement some basic Ant editing support from scratch.

And I know from experience, that doing that is not only a day of work.
Alright - it was my first Eclipse plug-in, and I probably lost quite some
time
on my private fights with the Eclipse platform and missing (or hard to
find)
Eclipse documentation - but isn't that developer's life ;-).

And I still ask myself why even an Eclipse 2.1 does not yet provide a
simple XML editor. It would have been so nice to just extend that one.
Unfortunately all other XML editor plug-ins out there are only half done
(or don't seem promising at all) or are commercial.

And to make it complete, Erich, you really should have tried it. It
certainly
would have sped you up. Besides the Section 'Roadmap' in about.html
would have been to your satisfaction. Contribution to Eclipse is one of the
items in there.

So, I now want to draw all of your attention on the 0.9.0 Release of
Planty from a few days ago. Planty is heading closer to a mature editor
for Ant build files and therefore closer to integration into the Eclipse
suite.
Its main features are Syntax Highlighting, Outline View and the most
important Code Assist with Additional Info Texts for tasks and attributes.

Coments are very welcome. Though, since I have already quite some
feature requests (People are calling for code formating, running tasks,
automatic validation, etc.), I would rather ask you to focus on comments
on the code or issues and improvements concerning a better integration
into Eclipse in near future.

You will find Planty on our download Section at
http://www.gebit.de/download/Download_java.htm

Enjoy it,
Alf