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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: 132904 views
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Summary

As this tutorial has shown, the DLTK provides myriad features for creating development environments for dynamic languages. Creating these environments doesn't require a lot of code, but you have to know exactly what you're doing. To configure text presentation, you must understand how the editor, viewer, and document interact as well as the rudiments of rule-based partitioning and scanning. To enable user preferences, you have to grasp the strange class hierarchy of Eclipse preference pages and DLTK configuration blocks. To enable launching of dynamic-language projects, you have to deal with threads, streams, and the protocol methods needed to communicate between the console and script interpreter.

The DLTK learning curve is steep and continues upward for a significant distance. But if you need to build a full-featured IDE for your customized script language, you'll find no better toolset. In addition to the material presented in this tutorial, DLTK provides many sample IDEs for languages like PHP and Tcl.

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