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Build an Eclipse development environment for Perl, Python, and PHP

Use the Dynamic Languages Toolkit (DLTK) to create your own IDE

Matthew Scarpino, Java Developer, Eclipse Engineering, LLC

Matthew Scarpino is a project manager and Java developer at Eclipse Engineering LLC. He is the lead author of SWT/JFace in Action and made a minor but important contribution to the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT). He enjoys Irish folk music, marathon running, the poetry of William Blake, and the Graphical Editing Framework (GEF).
(An IBM developerWorks Contributing Author)

Nathan A. Good, Senior Consultant and Freelance Developer, Freelance Developer

Nathan A. Good lives in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota. Professionally, he does software development, software architecture, and systems administration. When he's not writing software, he enjoys building PCs and servers, reading about and working with new technologies, and trying to get his friends to make the move to open source software. He's written and co-written many books and articles, including Professional Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, Regular Expression Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach, and Foundations of PEAR: Rapid PHP Development.

Summary: Eclipse presents a wealth of capabilities for building tools for compiled languages like C and the Java™ programming language but provides little support for scripting languages like Perl, Python, and PHP. For these and similar languages, the Eclipse Dynamic Languages Toolkit (DLTK) comes to the rescue. Walk through the process of building a DLTK-based IDE, and discover sample code for each step.

Date: 27 Oct 2011 (Published 03 Feb 2009)
Level: Intermediate
PDF: A4 and Letter (596 KB | 38 pages)Get Adobe® Reader®

Activity: 131022 views
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Before you start

About this tutorial

This tutorial shows how Eclipse's Dynamic Languages Toolkit (DLTK) makes it possible to build development tools for scripting languages. In particular, it explains how to implement syntax coloring, user preferences, and interpreter integration in a plug-in-based project.

Objectives

Frequently used acronyms

DLTK: Eclipse Dynamic Languages Toolkit
GPL: Gnu Public License
IDE: Integrated Development Environment
JRE: Java Runtime Environment
MVC: Model-View-Controller
SWT: Standard Widget Toolkit
UI: User Interface

This tutorial explains—one step at a time—how to build a DLTK-based development environment. The discussion presents DLTK by focusing on a practical plug-in project based on the Octave numerical computation language. The topics covered include:

Creating a plug-in project
Configuring the editor and Eclipse DLTK text tools
Adding classes to control syntax coloring in the text editor
Enabling user preferences
Integrating the script interpreter into the development environment
Adding a custom console to communicate between the workbench and the interpreter

Prerequisites

This tutorial is written for Java™ developers familiar with Eclipse and interested in building tools for dynamic languages, such as PHP, Tcl, Ruby, and Python. It assumes that you have a basic understanding of plug-ins and Eclipse-based development tools in general.

System requirements

To build the example project in this tutorial, you need a computer with an Eclipse installation (the examples in this tutorial use version 3.7 or later) and a current JRE. You must install a recent version of the DLTK, which we describe in the section "Install the DLTK." (See Resources for links to download Eclipse.)

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