Re: [pdt-dev] State of eclipse plugin development, any thoughts?

[Dawid Pakuła <zulus@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

current state is a nightmare :( I’m talking from PDT developer state, and also as PDT Extensions developer/maintainer. On each release we improve quality of extension points and utils, but they still aren’t developer friendly. But looks better than 3 years ago ;) [0]

For now, best place to see how things can be extened are plugins from PDT Extension Group [1]. For example autoedit you can find in DoctrineEclipsePlugin [2]

Basic documentation (off course outdated :/) for WTP SSE you can find here [3].

Complexity is a problem for most mature eclipse projects. Especially if they inherited some code base from JDT. While analyzing PDT / WTP / DLTK code you can find many classes/structures that doing similar things. Sometime exactly the same. 

PDT use WTP as core for it's editor, and DLTK to introduce PHP Language Specific elements, like Type Inference, Code Assist, Validation, Searching...

Try read basic PDT Extension Point Core-Plugin code [4] (core and ui). This should clear you many things. 

[0] - https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=480062

[1] - https://github.com/pdt-eg

[2] - https://github.com/pulse00/Doctrine-Eclipse-Plugin/blob/master/com.dubture.doctrine.ui

[3] - https://eclipse.org/webtools/wst/components/sse/overview.html

[4] - https://github.com/pdt-eg/Core-Plugin

-- 
Dawid Pakuła

From: Eenhuis <exceptione@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Reply: PDT Developers <pdt-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: 9 August 2016 at 16:56:00
To: pdt-dev <pdt-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject:  [pdt-dev] State of eclipse plugin development, any thoughts?

I try to develop some additional functionality for eclipse pdt, as you can see in my previous thread [1].

I have spent quite some time figuring out where to find the SSE autoedit extension point. Fact is, it doesn exist as such, but digging around the internet revealed there is a provisionalConfiguration  with type autoeditstrategy in org.eclipse.wst.sse.ui.editorConfiguration.


What bothers me is that I cannot find any docmentation about the extensibe parts of org.eclipse.wst.sse. As I understood from my experimenations [1], the documentation about pdt is incorrect and outdated. It took me a lot of time figuring out the dependencies for the sample pdt extension implementation, as the (granted, outdated) documentation does not mention them.


I am not experienced in eclipse plugin development, so I am inclined to attribute my impression ("this is one giant ball of undocumented dependency mudd") to my ignorance. How did you manage to  master this complexity? I feel both stupid and frustrated.


An other observation I had is that I can´t see clear boundaries. I see types from wtp, dltk, jface.text etc mixed all over the place (not just in pdt, also in wtp itself for example). Now, if I want to contribute functionality to pdt I have to understand its dependencies too.




LINKS:

1. http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/pdt-dev/msg03129.html




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