Re: [tcljava-user] Creating an Eclipse plug-in for TclBlend

[Gregory P. <gp...@ls...>]

Hi Patrick,

I probably haven't been clear in what my application is doing. What I am 
writing is an Eclipse (Rich Client Platform) RCP application.
This application will be writing in Eclipse Java and it will have a Tcl 
command shell. This command shell will be written using the Eclipse
SWT StyleText widget. This command shell will call TclBlend's Java->Tcl 
classes. For example:

Interp interp = new Interp();
interp.eval("puts hello");
...

The reason I don't want to use Jacl to provide a Tcl interface to my 
Java application is that I need to load Itcl because I have existing
Tcl code that needs to run in this command shell which depends on Itcl.

So far, I've been able to build a tcl.lang Eclipse plug-in, however, I'm 
working on a way for it to find the init.tcl file which I plan to
distribute with my RCP application. BTW, I should note that I built 
TclBlend by statically linking in Tcl 8.4.11 using the .a file.
This eliminates the need for my RCP application to locate and load the 
libtcl8.4.so file.

Usually, there's always a way to do something. I'm well on my way to 
finding it. I was just hoping that someone on this user group
might have some information that would help.

Thanks,
Greg Pierce



Patrick Finnegan wrote:

> See my post on comp.lang.tcl re running JACL under RAD6/Eclipse.
>
> http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.tcl/browse_frm/thread/3d26cccab289a00e/c59a217ca0bdd708?lnk=st&q=group:*tcl*+author:Patrick+author:Finnegan&rnum=2&hl=en#c59a217ca0bdd708
>
> In my opinion developing an Eclipse plugin for TclBlend is rather 
> pointless as TclBlend is architected to connect to a JVM rather than 
> run inside a JVM.  It's designed to expose the Java system libraries 
> for use in a dynamic language environment.  Mo may correct me but 
> AFAIK you cannot write native Java under TclBlend so you can't debug 
> under Eclipse. 
>
> I use TclBlend to implement system monitoring scripts for MQ Series 
> and DB2 using the JDK and IBM supplied Java API libraries.  Since 
> TclBlend is certified to work with only a certain release of  JAVA we 
> compile TclBlend on Windows against the appropriate JDK and bundle 
> that JDK with the distro so TclBlend always knows the location of the 
> JDK.  The Sun JDK licence allows JDK re-distribution with applications.
>
>  The directory structure looks like:
>
> D:\tclBlend
> D:\tclBlend\JDK142
> D:\tclBlend\lib
> D:\tclBlend\bin
>
> We drop any required tcl packages in the lib directory and ship these 
> as well.  We compile TclBlend on Windows XP and deploy to Windows 2003 
> server with no issues.  On Win2k TclBlend is called from a bat file 
> "jtclsh.bat" that sets up the env vars.  I  created a tcl script 
> "tclblend.tcl" to set the required env vars then starpacked it using 
> the "set base $starkit::topdir" to locate the installation directory 
> and from there the relative location of the JDK.  Tclblend.exe calls 
> tclsh.exe  which locates the JDK in the same sub-directory of the 
> installation directory regardless of where TclBlend is installed.
>
> Eclipse may be useful if someone writes a Tcl editor/debug plugin that 
> can switch from Tcl to the java editor/debugger when TclBlend calls a 
> java class or method.  Otherwise stick with SourceNav.
>