Bending Eclipse to Your Will: From ENVY/Smalltalk to Wrath

Gabriel Castro

Eclipse IDE And Languages - Tools · Long - one hour
Tuesday, 14:30, 50 minutes | Room 207

Gabriel Castro

Implementing an IDE in Eclipse for a language that is orthogonal to current supported Eclipse languages is an incredible challenge. Mapping foreign languages concepts, such as the always available runtime, to Eclipse idioms has proven to be difficult. We address the challenges and their solutions in this talk about building a Smalltalk IDE in Eclipse.

Our talk will present the issues we have experienced and how we have overcome them. It will also highlight deficiencies we found in Eclipse, as well as some of solutions.

Some examples of these issues include:

Mapping an always available runtime to Eclipse launching & debug support
Mapping Smalltalk's global knowledge to Eclipse's per-project builders
Mapping Smalltalk's Applications to Eclipse's file-system view

We will also demonstrate the fully working system.

Gabriel is a software engineer and UXD professional at the IBM Ottawa Lab where he has worked on developing Eclipse-based tools for the J9 Java Class Library and Virtual Machine teams for almost four years. While at the Communications Research Centre he helped develop a DTV multimedia datacasting system for use in the Canadian Arctic. Gabriel is currently the J9 Development Tools Design lead as well as an Eclipse contributor. He can be reached via e-mail at castrog {_at_} ca.ibm.com