[news.eclipse.technology.ldt] Re: Beyond textual represenations...

[Constantie Plotnikov <constantine.plotnikov@xxxxxxxxx>]

Mike Kaufman wrote:
> Yes, I think this is a good compromise.  I think that part of the LDT's 
> intial effort is going to be define APIs for a generic AST.  Consequently, 
> tools can be written to the API to operate on a language-neutral AST.
>
> Persisting this AST is orthogonal to these APIs though, and I'm not at all 
> aware how the plugin you describe would be written.  And, it feels like a 
> pretty large effort to build a plugin to have eclipse persist ASTs instead 
> of text files.  I do think though, that such a plugin would be a client of 
> the LDT APIs though, and not part of the LDT itself.
1. JDT DOM API is too Java dependent now. Changing it to make it more 
generic would break clients anyway. So it might make sense not become 
too fixed on JDT. A new API that is JDT other might be used.

2. EMF project (http://www.eclipse.org/emf) already provides a generic 
model API. Usual AST there is result of parsing some document would 
usually underuse EMF features. This API natively supports persisting as 
XML. As I understand there is a work underway to support persisting to 
the database. It also natively supports event notifcations and with some 
efforts undo/redo through commands.

I cannot say that EMF is perfect. But a lot of efforts is invested in it 
and new AST API would just duplicate these efforts.

3. The competing to eclipse.org project named Netbeans have a competing 
to EMF framework named MDR (http://mdr.netbeans.org). As I heard, this 
framework is used to implement part similar to JDT AST in netbeans 4.0 
(see http://mdr.netbeans.org/javamdr/).

Constantine