Eclipse source code

[vin Hari]

Dear Experts,

As i am new to eclipse i am going through the details of it, as i read about eclipse,
Please tell me what is Eclipse Galileo , is it a version of eclipse or what exactly it is,

then please give me a proper link for the source code of the eclipse IDE as i have to build a similar kind of IDE
for my project , please give me the details of it.

thanks in advance.

[Christophe Verré]

Please tell me what is Eclipse Galileo , is it a version of eclipse or what exactly it is,

Yes, it is a version of Eclipse, version 3.5.

please give me a proper link for the source code of the eclipse IDE

The source is stored in a repository. Look at this wiki to find out how to get it. And don't forget to check this too. I'm not sure it's going to help you do anything because it's huge and maybe not adapted to your requirements...

[vin Hari]

Dear Experts,

Thank you for your reply,

But can you please tell me i heard the eclipse is mainly build on java , so is there any way i can get those .java files,

for that i am searching is there any posiblity of getting that please inform.

and also what all the platforms it support whether it support linux all flavours with 64 bit , and unix , AIX ,SunOS,win64
please help me to know them.

thanks in advance.

[Jesper de Jong]

Eclipse is written in Java. Christophe already posted a link to a page that explains how you can get the source code. Did you not read that page?

On the download page you can see that there are Eclipse packages for Windows, Mac OS X, 32-bit and 64-bit Linux. I guess it should also be able to work on other operating systems, if you have Java 5 available.

[vin Hari]

sorry i may be asking little silly please answer this

Please tell as i am getting confused and not able to download

which links are proper
This one
http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/
or
http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/

contain actual source code(.java) for eclipse,
thanks in advance.

[David Newton]

The first one.

There are hundreds of thousands of lines. Eclipse is written in a *very* abstract way in order to support all the extensibility points it has.

It's non-trivial in scope--if you're building something for a school project it is *not* the place to start.

[Tim Holloway]

vin Hari wrote: i have to build a similar kind of IDE
for my project

You have a large experienced development team, about $26 million and a few years to spare? That's what it took for IBM to build Eclipse. The source code is all available from the Eclipse download site, but I should point out that people expert enough to build a professional-grade IDE shouldn't have to be told that.

[vin Hari]

Thank you very much for the reply,

No its not a School project or I am not going to copy that source code to my project,

its only for my understanding how they have developed that IDE.

Thanks again.

[vin Hari]

Dear Experts,

Thank you for your replies,

but i wanted to know whether is there any other standard way to my own IDE , means i have my own programming language and its corresponding

shared Object in Linux and irix machines and also corresponding DLL in windows with this background how to develop my IDE which understands my programing launguage please help me and guide me.

thanks in advance.

[David Newton]

Depends on what you mean by "understand". Syntax highlighting is easy. Everything else... not necessarily so much.

[Tim Holloway]

vin Hari wrote:Dear Experts,

Thank you for your replies,

but i wanted to know whether is there any other standard way to my own IDE , means i have my own programming language and its corresponding

shared Object in Linux and irix machines and also corresponding DLL in windows with this background how to develop my IDE which understands my programing launguage please help me and guide me.

thanks in advance.

One fairly easy way to do that is not by inventing your own IDE, but by creating plugins for the Eclipse IDE to support editing the language you want. I did that for a macro language I created. Others have done plugins for COBOL, Unix shell scripts, Perl, SQL and Python, and those are just the ones I can think of without really trying.

You don't need DLLs or other non-portable constructs to develop an Eclipse plugin, just "write-once/run-anywhere" java code.

[vin Hari]

Dear Experts,
thank you for the reply that is exacly what i want ,

i want to create plugin for my language and want to import it to the eclipse, my launguage is not in java
and want this IDE in all platforms, as Tom said he has done for the macro launguage,

can you please giude me how to make my lanuguage understand for the eclipse , and create a proper plugin for that.

i have my own parser how to make it to understand that , please guide me i need a help from you.

[vin Hari]

Please answer to my query.

[David Newton]

Writing Eclipse plugins is also non-trivial. There are books that discuss it, as well as a few online tutorials. I'd suggest starting there.

[vin Hari]

Thanks for the reply,

ya it may be easy for you , but as i am new with this how do i create a plugin to my own launguage that
should be understood to the eclipse please provide me some useful sites

[David Newton]

No, I said it's *non*-trivial, meaning it's not very easy. (Well, it's not that bad, really, but I've worked with Eclipse code before.)

Seriously--search the web; there are resources out there.

[vin Hari]

Thank you for the reply,

Please Tim Hollway why dont you give me some useful sites,

as you said you have actually worked on it. for your launguage the same way i need please provide some inputs.

[Hong Anderson]

In theory you can use Eclipse as a platform to implement an IDE for any language. One example is Carbide C++ which is a C++ IDE based on Eclipse.

I think you should specify the scope first, what are features of your IDE? Like compiling, code editing, refactoring, debugging, hot swap replacement, syntax coloring, code assist, etc.

For debugging Eclipse Platform has Platform Debug which defines interfaces for a language independent debug model.
http://www.eclipse.org/eclipse/debug/index.php

[Tim Holloway]

vin Hari wrote:Thank you for the reply,

Please Tim Hollway why dont you give me some useful sites,

as you said you have actually worked on it. for your launguage the same way i need please provide some inputs.

I got most of my information from The Java Developer's Guide to Eclipse by Shavor, D'Anjou, Fairbrother et. al. I'm not sure it's the plainest explanation, but I had to start somewhere. To that I added the online help from Eclipse itself. The only website I used was a short paper by HP. I don't remember what its URL is. The book and the HP document may be out of date by now.

The thing I didn't like about Eclipse plugin development was that it looked like the Eclipse architects had been ruined by Microsoft OLE/COM. Everything was a loose bunch of interfaces instead of a unified whole, and there wasn't any organized master directory I knew of.

Eclipse does provide a plugin wizard to get you started, but this is definitely not a "Hello World!" type of programming effort. I've worked as an OS-level programmer for over 20 years, written a few compilers and a lot of system exit routines, and I still ended up screaming at it more than once. Ideally someone should be paying you good sums of money to do that. You'll need the money to buy the aspirins and antacids.

[David Newton]

It doesn't have anything to do with OLE/COM, it's patterns. Because of its Smalltalk heritage, and the involvement of some old-school Smalltalky/patterny folks, almost everything is implemented as an interface, which is one thing that allows the radical customizations.

Two plug-in development links:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-eclipse-plugindev1/index.html?ca=dgr-eclipse-1
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-eclipse-plugindev2/?ca=dgr-eclipse-1

[Tim Holloway]

David Newton wrote:It doesn't have anything to do with OLE/COM, it's patterns. Because of its Smalltalk heritage, and the involvement of some old-school Smalltalky/patterny folks, almost everything is implemented as an interface, which is one thing that allows the radical customizations.

Two plug-in development links:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-eclipse-plugindev1/index.html?ca=dgr-eclipse-1
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-eclipse-plugindev2/?ca=dgr-eclipse-1

They must not be THAT old-school. Smalltalk - at least back when I was using it - was object-oriented. OLE/COM is interface-oriented. Having worked with both, I'd say that the Eclipse plugins look a lot more like OLE than like Smalltalk. The Microsoft-style naming doesn't help any, either. At least they didn't use Hungarian Notation (I think - it's been a while).

I'm not even sure what classes in Smalltalk you'd use to do interface-oriented programming. But then, I did most of my work in Smalltalk back in the '90's. Even had an implementation in Beta for the Commodore Amiga in '92. Right before that market imploded. Pity. It was a good fit. Aside from the high-level conveniences that allowed me to swipe GUI functions directly from the OS window manager, the OS kernel was a direct borrowing of Smalltalk OOP. I know that because I met Carl Sassenrath, who wrote it, and mentioned how well C++ mapped onto it. He said he hadn't heard of C++ then (it was still 2-3 years in the future), but he did acknowledge his debt to Smalltalk.

[David Newton]

Kent Beck (hmm, maybe it was Gamma) is pretty old-school. They mapped it as best as they could, using the "I" notation as was popular at the time :/

Java *has* to use interfaces where Smalltalk could use objects because of the compile-time type checking. You can send any message to any object in Smalltalk--if it can handle it, it does. In Java you have to specify up-front what messages an object accepts, which generally ends up meaning extensible systems use *lots* of interfaces.

I "fondly" recall wondering why anybody was interested in Java (my first job out of school was Smalltalk and Lisp programming, back in 1990) when we had Smalltalk. As my co-workers can attest, I'm "fond" of saying that I'm only just now beginning to be as productive in Java as I was in Smalltalk (or Lisp) twenty years ago :/

[Hong Anderson]

Tim Holloway wrote:
The thing I didn't like about Eclipse plugin development was that it looked like the Eclipse architects had been ruined by Microsoft OLE/COM. Everything was a loose bunch of interfaces instead of a unified whole, and there wasn't any organized master directory I knew of.

Hm, I don't understand what you mean. Could you please to explain more what is "a unified whole" and how it is better than "loose bunch of interfaces"? And what is "organized master directory"?

[Tim Holloway]

Kengkaj Sathianpantarit wrote:

Tim Holloway wrote:
The thing I didn't like about Eclipse plugin development was that it looked like the Eclipse architects had been ruined by Microsoft OLE/COM. Everything was a loose bunch of interfaces instead of a unified whole, and there wasn't any organized master directory I knew of.

Hm, I don't understand what you mean. Could you please to explain more what is "a unified whole" and how it is better than "loose bunch of interfaces"? And what is "organized master directory"?

The problem with OLE was that you never really had what you could call an "object reference" or "handle". Instead, you could only grab hold of an Interface. The OLE equivalent of a base class was the IUnknown Interface. But with interfaces, unlike classes, you couldn't simply cast to the method contract you wanted. You had to depend on one interface handing over another interface. I never really felt like I was working with something tangible, myself.

An "organized master directory" would be just a reference guide abstracted up to a higher level. Instead of just documenting interfaces as they came, it would make some formal attempt to define stock components and what interfaces they'd typically present and how they'd interact. And, since Eclipse provides for some fairly complex constructs, possibly a second-level (facet) index as well.

I'm kind of a snot about technical documentation. It comes from doing lots of OS-level work where you're pretty much playing "Hide and Seek" to begin with. For me, for example, the attribute definitions on a JSF tag aren't REALLY documented unless in addition to name and type, they include mandatory/optional, default value, co-requisites, contra-requisites, an explanatory paragraph, lines and circles and a paragraph on the back explaining what each one is.

[vin Hari]

Thank you for the reply,

But before trying to integrate my plugin i want to try,

CDT(c/c++) how to it works and all but i am not getting can you please suggest regarding this
i am trying to add cdt 6.0 with eclipse galileo but not able to get the required,
i have MinGW , cdt 6.0 , with eclipse 6.0 instead of using the update software i am following this

tutorial to install a plugin so i can get some idea.
[url]
http://www.cs.umanitoba.ca/~eclipse/7-EclipseCDT.pdf[/url]

but there is some problem when i try to build

Internal Builder: Cannot run program "g++": The system

even i though i have set the path and i can compile and run from command line.
as in the tutorial says after unzipping the cdt i should get that folder structure i am not getting that instead the CDT 6.0 contains only jar files

please tell me how to proceed i want to add cdt plugin to eclipse 3.5 please help.



and also one i am trying to use svn to download the source code i have installed tortoise svn client and using

svn co svn+ssh://[e-mail]/svnroot/technology/some.repository

but it is showing

svn: Can't create tunnel: The system cannot find the file specified

why it is showing so ,whether it is a right path or not please inform.

[David Newton]

Are you an Eclipse committer? Are you typing in the svn command exactly as you've shown here?!

[vin Hari]

No , i am not a eclipse commiter,

please tell me the exact command to get the source code of eclipse, through svn

please tell me proper command.

[vin Hari]

Please answer

[David Newton]

Here's the steps I did to find the source code:

1) Went to http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/.
2) Saw the "looking for Older Versions or Source Code" link.
3) Clicked on the Source Code link.
4) Read the first section on the page.

It was quicker than waiting for someone to answer here.

[Tim Holloway]

I know this may sound unkind, but it's not intended to be:

Back in the days before mainframes, there were 2 primary type of programmers. Applications programmers and Systems Programmers. Applications Programmers are important. They're responsible for the software that actually runs the business. Or, in the case of an application software house, produces the product that gets sold.

System programmers don't do anything that useful. However, what they do do is support the software that makes it possible for the applications programmers to develop the applications, and for the applications to run in production. The Systems programmers got paid significantly more. When an applications programmer screws up, it can screw up a major part of the business. When a systems programmer screws up, it not infrequently completely shuts down the business. So systems programmers had to have certain skills or traits that aren't necessarily or maybe even desirable for an applications programmer to have. One of those is an obsessive attention to detail. If code works proper 990 times out of a thousand an application can probably live with that. Systems code, however is often the stuff that gets executed 10,000 times a second, so it has the be as close to flawless as possible.

Another, and equally important skill for a systems programmer to have is the ability to research and to experiment. You have to pull in a lot of specialized knowledge. So do applications people, but the applications staff is typically larger than the systems staff by a factor of 10 or more. And the systems people normally each handle their own specialized products, so there's less ability to borrow knowledge from co-workers. So we get really good at RTFM'ing and at devising and running experimental code.

There are times when I wonder if the reason we have so much flakey software these days is that the concept of Systems Programming didn't translate over to PCs. It's easier (and cheaper) to simply reboot a PC. That kind of practice wasn't something you could get away with on a mainframe. But that's another matter.

What this is all leading up to is that when you start working with the source code for editors, compilers, operating systems and so forth, you're doing Systems Programming. So you need to develop Systems programming skills, and that includes making a basic effort to get familiar with the package in question and the support facilities offered on its website.

When you just ask for elementary information to be simply handed to you, a lot of forums would gain you a response of "RTFM", followed by a serious flame-fest. JavaRanch isn't like that (which is why I prefer the JavaRanch.) Even I ask "stupid" questions sometimes ). But a task as complex as the one you're attempting is going to generate a lot of questions, and after a while, people are going to burn out doing your homework for you.

So please, have mercy on us. If you've made a good-faith effort and you just can't find what you need, we'll be glad to help. You're shooting for a level that probably 9 out of 10 software people never even attempt and you deserve all the help you can get. I myself can miss the obvious, well, not more than 17 times on the average day, so if you get stuck, don't be afraid to ask. As I said, we're not going to flame you for missing the "obvious". But aside from the fact that we can't baby-sit a complex task like that, you'd be eligible for retirement before you got done if you had to depend on our help and the delays that come from getting assistance from a volunteer-only forum.

[Hong Anderson]

I agree with Tim. By the way, working with Eclipse source code (or just developing Eclipse plugins) is far more difficult than setup CDT. I recommend to do risk assessment if you want to continue this project.

Anyway, what is RTFM?

[Tim Holloway]

Kengkaj Sathianpantarit wrote:Anyway, what is RTFM?

Read The Flippin' Manual.

Well, actuallly. the 3d word isn't usually read as "Flippin'" and it certainly isn't "Fine", since like I said, it frequently heads up a flame deluge. But I think you get the idea.

[vin Hari]

Really sorry for the repeatedly asking this question,

any how the problem got resolved as there was problem in the network connection which

were not connecting to the CVS Repository online which i thought i am not able to download and asking you people,

yesterday i checked properly with the help of network admin to provide such facility , now able to download the source,

thanks for help.

[Hong Anderson]

Thanks for the update.

[Tim Holloway]

vin Hari wrote:Really sorry for the repeatedly asking this question,

any how the problem got resolved as there was problem in the network connection which

were not connecting to the CVS Repository online which i thought i am not able to download and asking you people,

yesterday i checked properly with the help of network admin to provide such facility , now able to download the source,

thanks for help.

I hate those kinds of problems. At least your network administrator was one of the helpful ones!