Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Eclipse Monkey-get ur program written by a monkey

Eclipse is a highly extensible IDE(Integrated Development Environment) and much much more. The eclipse monkey from project dash is a great addition to eclipse. To put it in a single sentence the eclipse monkey is the eclipse equivalent of greasemonkey. Eclipse monkey provides javascript extensions for "eclipse", which is best suited for small additions.

A example of what eclipse monkey can do is the "comment" script- it simply adds "//"in front of the selected lines of code. The repetitive tasks that may be specific to a project can be done by these monkeys.

Some features that are needed by eclipse monkey are-
  1. A script manager-Now "Scripts are installed in the Monkey menu by placing them in "*.em" files in a top-level "monkey" folder of any project (obviously, scripts are un-installed by renaming or moving them). The complete set of scripts is the union of the scripts in all the top-level monkey folders in the workspace."However, it would be better to have a script manager that lists the various scripts that are present. The projects for which the scripts are needed are to be included or excluded using the script manager.
  2. Undo script action--even for scripts run during past sessions.
  3. Running multiple scripts in combination-a sort of piping.For example-a script to find all lines with "system.out.println" should pipe its output to the script that will comment these lines. Separate monkeys should work together without the need for writing new scripts.
Enough of feature requests. It would be better if we wrote monkeys to get all these features.

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