Re: [SrcML] static source code analyzis

[Frank R. <fra...@in...>]

On Wed, May 04, 2005 at 01:36:31AM +0200, Leif Bladt wrote:
> My main goal is a tool which supports the programmer with static 
> analyses (like possible errors, unused code, will be defined later in 
> detail). Therefore a plug-in into an existing IDE (like Eclipse), 
> instead of a single GUI-application, would be fine. Because I don't 
> have a clue how to write an Eclipse plug-in, I thought about an Ant 
> plug-in (this is probably just a normal java program). 

Ant plugin? Ant is a build platform which is comparable to GNU make.
I don't think it makes sense to plug into that.

As for an Eclipse plugin this has been planned for a while now. We can
offer you a book on the subject (Gamma et.al: Contributing to Eclipse)
in which you can read up on how plugins for Eclipse are created. Basically
it's a very simple process of writing a special XML file for your plugin.

The statical analyses per se don't really require Eclipse, so the Eclipse
integration would rather mean making the complete SrcML Framework available
within Eclipse (i.e. allowing the current file/project to be parsed). We'll
have to think of how to get the plugins done easily and still be able to
run the rest without Eclipse as well.

> So for 
> this tool I will need the "analyze platform" which handles the analyze 
> plug-ins, and the plug-ins themselves. I'm still thinking about a 
> reasonable set of plug-ins. be patient :-)

The platform will be neccessary of course. What I'm wondering (without having
thought about it in lengths yet, so I guess you're ahead of me there) is
whether we should have different types of plugins for 1) performing the
analysis and 2) presenting the result. The Eclipse plugin should then be a
plugin of the second type. And of course one to invoke the platform and the
plugins of type 1.

-- 
Raiser, Frank
Student @ University of Ulm (www.uni-ulm.de)

Not all comments are bad. But they are generally deodorant;
they cover up mistakes in the code. (Christian Sepulveda)