Re: [ANN] Lua Development Tools available at Eclipse.org

[Benjamin Cabé <bcabe@...>]

Thomas, Philippe, et al.


>>There are hints: the fact the project seems to be an official Eclipse
>>one, the access to
>>the source code... So I can suppose it is open source, likely to be under
>>the EPL license.
>
>I agree wholeheartedly with this comment.

We will make that more clear [1] on the project page (sorry if it looks
too professional :-)) but yes, indeed, the project is Open Source, under
the EPL license.
The whole source code is available at
http://git.eclipse.org/c/koneki/org.eclipse.koneki.ldt.git , with a mirror
at https://github.com/eclipse/koneki.ldt for people more familiar with
github.

Thomas, since I assume you are pretty familiar with Eclipse/RCP
development already, you should be glad to learn that the source code is
super-easy to build, since we rely on Maven Tycho for the build process.
Anybody checking out the source code can indeed perform a "mvn clean
install", and end up with built plugins/features/update sites + unit tests
results... 

>
>>But since there are commercial IDEs for Lua, and commercial plug-ins for
>>Eclipse, I think 
>>it is better to be explicit about this.
>>
>>Just a kind advice. Looks great, and the page is very professional. :-)
>>
>>It is a bit funny to use a behemoth like Eclipse to work on a lightweight
>>language like 
>>Lua, but some people (lot of Java programmers, some C/C++ ones, etc.)
>>already have the 
>>IDE, so it is not a real problem...
>
>What is interesting to me is that as a company whose product contains an
>integrated Lua interpreter we've invested time in integrating LuaEclipse
>into our project and contributing fixes and changes back to that project,
>I'm hoping that this team is working with Jason Santos and the various
>folks who've cloned that git repository to make sure we're not stepping
>backwards.

We reached out to Jason back when we started working seriously on
developing a Lua development environment (yes, we also build commercial
products on top of Eclipse :)), and when we felt that using DLTK [2]
(together with Metalua) would be the best way to get most of the features
people usually expect from an IDE (outline, code folding, Š) "virtually
for free" (vs the ANTLR approach of LuaEclipse 1.x). Then, we started to
work on providing debugging support based on the DBGP protocol. This was
all done on the github fork of Jason's LuaEclipse 2.x prototype, thus with
no more support for LuaDoc, Lua profiler, etc. We would of course welcome
and help anyone volunteering to bring these features back to LDT! While
these features are indeed missing in LDT just now, I would not say that
LDT is that far behind LuaEclipse 1.x in terms of provided features (but
please feel free to correct me if you think I'm wrong!)

At the time we made the decision to go under the umbrella of the Eclipse
Foundation, we thought (and we've been proven very right so far) it would
bring us a lot of advantages: infrastructure for continuous integration,
bug tracking, mailing list, forum, more visibility, ...


>That being said, since our embedded UI development suite Crank Storyboard
>(http://www.cranksoftware.com/storyboard) is Eclipse based and we are
>heavy Lua users we're happy to pledge our support to this new Eclipse
>project if the community consensus is that that is where Lua Eclipse IDE
>lovers should congregate.

FWIW we will provide an "all-in-one" distribution soon, that should "only"
be ~40MB large, for ppl who do not want/need to install a full-featured
Eclipse SDK and/or don't want to deal with the sometimes cryptic update
site stuff :)

>Congratulations guys!  We look forward to working with you!

Same here! :) That's literally thrilling to get such positive feedback!

FYI the Koneki-dev mailing list is here [3], and the forum (for more
general questions) is here [4].

Cheers,
Benjamin -

[1] - https://bugs.eclipse.org/364051
[2] - http://eclipse.org/dltk/
[3] - https://dev.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/koneki-dev
[4] - http://www.eclipse.org/forums/eclipse.koneki