Project website: LANG_IDE_SITE

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Developers Guide

Building the IDE:

You will need Maven for building LANG_IDE_NAME.

• To build, run mvn clean verify at the root of the repository. This will run the test suite, and afterwards produce a p2 repository (an Eclipse Software Site) at bin-maven/features.repository/repository.
• To just build without running tests, invoke mvn clean package.

Setting up a development environment:

• You need Eclipse PDE to develop Eclipse plugins. Download and start it.
• Clone the Git repository.
• In Eclipse, click "File / Import... ", and then "General / Existing projects into workspace". Select the Git repository folder as the "root directory", enable "Search for nested projects", and select all the Eclipse projects that show up. Click finish to import those projects.
  
  
  • Note: The actual project names will be different from those in the screenshot above.
  • Note: Java compiler settings will be automatically configured, since Eclipse compiler settings are stored in source version control.
• Setup the target platform. Unfortunately due to limitations in Tycho/PDE tooling (more info) some manual steps are required:
  1. Open a shell on target-platform/ and run mvn package. This should create a deps-repository/repository directory.
  2. Copy the target platform file: target-platform/IDE-base.target to target-platform/IDE-gen.target. (this last filename is already git-ignored).
  3. Open target-platform/IDE-gen.target in Eclipse, so that it opens under the PDE editor.
  4. Click "Add", then select "Software Site".
  5. On the "Add Software Site" dialog, click "Add...", then "Local...", navigate to Git repo directory, then choose the target-platform/deps-repository/repository directory.
  6. On the "Add Software Site" dialog, the new repository should be selected. Click "Select All" to select all deps, then click "Finish". It should look more or less like this:
     
  7. Then finally click "Set as Target Platform".
• Build the workspace ( "Project / Build All"). Everything should build fine now, there should be no errors.
• To start the IDE from your workspace: Open "Run / Run Configurations ...". Click on "Eclipse Application" to create a new launch for the plugins in your workspace. The default new configuration that is created should already be ready to be launched.
• Additional tip: Locate the bin-maven folder in the top-level project, open its Properties from the Project Explorer context menu, and mark that directory as "Derived" in the "Resources" property page. This will prevent those folder resources to appear in UI operations such as "Open Resource" for example.

1. Ensure the version numbers of all plugins/features/etc. are properly updated, if they haven't been already.
2. Run mvn clean verify to perform the Tycho build (see section above). Ensure all tests pass.
   • To create a signed release the sign-build Maven profile must be activated, and the required properties set.
3. Create and push a new release tag for the current release commit.
4. Go to the Github releases page and edit the newly present release. Add the corresponding (ChangeLog.md) entries to the release notes.
5. Locally, run ant -f releng/ CreateProjectSite. This last step will prepare the project web site under bin-maven/ProjectSite.
6. To actually publish the project site, run ant -f releng/ PublishProjectSite -DreleaseTag=<tagName>. What happens here is that the whole project site will be pushed into a Git repository, to then be served in some way (for example Github Pages). If projectSiteGitURL is not specified, the default value in releng-build.properties will be used.
   • For more info on the Release Engineering script, run ant -f releng/, this will print the help.
7. A branch or tag named latest should also be created in Github, pointing to the latest release commit. The previous latest tag can be deleted/overwritten. The documentation pages use this tag/branch in their links.

Project design info and notes

LangEclipseIDE

This project uses the LangEclipseIDE framework, which is designed to have its source embedded in the host IDE. See this section for more info on how this should be managed.

Extensive Compile-Time type and contract checking

See https://github.com/bruno-medeiros/MelnormeEclipse/wiki/Extensive-Compile-Time-Checking for more info on this principle.

Code style:

• Indent with tabs (tab size is 4 spaces)
• Max line width: 120
• Block style:

  if(foo.blah()) {
      doThis();
  }

• Indentation for function arguments: 1 indent unit (= 1 tab):

  foo(one, two, three,
      four, five, six);

There is also an Eclipse formatter profile settings file you can use, although you are not obliged to format with all rules of that formatter settings. If you make a minor source change, don't format the whole file, but only around the changes you are contributing.

Unit tests double-method wrapper:

This code idiom is often used in this project's JUnit tests:

@Test
public void testXXX() throws Exception { testXXX$(); }
public void testXXX$() throws Exception {

This is donely solely as an aid when debugging code, so that the "Drop to frame" functionality can be used on the unit-test method. It seems the Eclipse debugger (or the JVM) cannot drop-to-frame to a method that is invoked dynamically (such as the unit-test method). So we wrap the unit-test method on another one. So while we now cannot drop-to-frame in testXXX, we can do it in testXXX$, which basically allows us to restart the unit-test.

TODO: investigate if there is an alternate way to achieve the same. I haven't actually checked that.