Notes from Scripting breakout session at e4 summit, 23-May-2008

Scripting What?

Use cases

Quick macro editor?
Short scripts to manipulate the IDE
Scripting builds -- Implementing the workspace build
Replace Core Expressions
As a part of the language-independence story
Simplify the process of writing new refactorings
Lower the barrier to entry for plugin writers
Avoiding class loading
People get to work in their favorite language
Throwaway programming
Enabling Notes developers to script the environment
Being able to bring in developers from other communities
Checkout HEAD, run perf tests, Checkout HEAD-1, run perf tests, etc. until I found the perf regressions

Questions/comments

Scripting =?= easy
Eclipse Monkey runs today against the workspace state
Scala is already a first class citizen in the JVM runtime. We should exploit that.
We also shouldn't let this capability make it impossible to use Rhino, etc...
Is scripting the way we call across language boundaries where the language isn't a native JVM lanaguage?
Important to extend Eclipse community around scripting languages
Why do I need scripts? Why not just inject real Java into the running workspace?
How do we handle threading?
What if the macro loops forever? Does it block the UI thread forever? What is the answer?
Having a DOM model representing/aggregating all model roots is useful for Java, not just for scripting.

Macros

Today we can write a plugin that catches commands as they go by
But you can't see model state
Workspace context might be an issue here
Do we record macros by screen scraping SWT events? At the level of Commands?
Use case: Command recording lets you find out what the commands are for writing cheat sheets
Challenge: Screen scraping SWT events has a hard time knowing if background jobs completed.

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