Tag Archive for 'eclipse'

AS3V For Ant Released

Since I started the development of some other library I completly put AS3V aside because the Eclipse integration with FDT is currently not possible. But since AS3V is working already I decided to release a version really quick that allows you to use AS3V as an Ant Task or simply from command line.

I know it would be better to have it as an Eclipse Plug-in with nice little markers etc. but for that I need some more extension points in FDT. I do not know about FlexBuilder but it would be probably the same.

The file includes an example build and some test cases that show you how AS3V can detect common errors and mistakes. There is currently not that much documentation available for the rules and parameters you can specify. Putting a list online with all rules and nice descriptions is of course something I would like to do but currently the time for that is missing. I hope everything is self-explaining if you have a look at the readme and example files.

Update: The AS3V package has been updated with one bug fix and some modifications so that AS3V will produce a more interesting log output if it fails for some reason. Using AS3V with Eclipse works only if you specify fork="true" like in the Flex SDK example from the build file that comes with the zip.

AS3V Preview

AS3V Here is the first preview of what AS3V looks like in Eclipse. I have written about 30 rules which include cyclomatic complexity checks and unreachable code detection. Most of the time was getting AS3V to link against the asc.jar from the Flex SDK inside Eclipse which is a real nightmare if you ever tried that one for yourself. However — it works. And hopefully I can forget about all the code I had to write pretty soon.

You can see in the screenshot that AS3V places markers in your Eclipse code. It works as an incremental project builder which means it is pretty fast since it only evaluates all your sources that have changed independently. If you have any suggestions for possible rules, please tell me. The Flex SDK coding conventions could be interesting for instance. Right now the Eclipse plug-in has still some problems but I think that a first version might be released in the next few weeks.

MetaLaunch For Eclipse

MetaLaunch Plug-inEver wanted to start multiple launchers with one single click in Eclipse? MetaLaunch will solve this issue. Just select the launchers you want to start and then change the order to fit your needs. You can also select to launch those tasks sequential or in a one shot.

Unfortunately I have not figured out yet how I could abort the launch process if mxmlc fails for instance. This is due to the fact that the fcsh process is persistent and does not return for instance a non-zero exit code when mxmlc reported an error. However, the MetaLaunch plug-in can help you in a lot of cases. For instance if you are developing a multi-client application and you want to launch every time four instances of the Flash Player etc.

The address of the Eclipse update site:

http://metalaunch.joa-ebert.com/update

PBDT with basic refactoring

PBDT RefactoringPBDT has a new feature which is basic refactoring. Simply select the variable you want to rename and press Alt+Shift+R or select “Rename” from the context menu. There are currently two issues with refactoring. If the refactoring entry in the context menu is disabled please select the variable and try again. The same for the shortcut. If you want to refactor something, just select it first in the text. Once I figure out how Eclipse handles changes of the caret position I will fix that.

The second is about scopes. If you redefine a variable in a different scope the refactoring is not correct. But I guess 99% of the developers will not get in touch with this issue.
In this example i would be refactored in the outer and inner scope which is not correct.

void evaluatePixel()
{
        int i;

        {
        	int i;
        	i;
        }

        i;

        out = sampleNearest(src,outCoord());
}

PixelBender on Linux

Here is a nice tutorial that explains how to get PixelBender to work on Linux systems. Adobe offers just a Mac and Windows version of the toolkit. But using PBDT in combination with Wine allows PixelBender to work on Linux systems. How cool is that?

I also updated the PBDT plug-in to get rid of some errors. I did not include all feature requests yet because the FFK in Cologne is currently eating up all my time.

PBDT Release

I just released my PixelBender plug-in for Eclipse. It integrates for us very charming into the workflow and is a good help when developing PixelBender kernels. I have put up a tutorial and instructions at this page.

Features of the PBDT plug-in include code completion, syntax highlightning and some other nifty features. It can be integrated into existing projects in FDT or FlexBuilder. Let me know what you think and please report any bugs or issues back to me.

A special thanks goes to Arne Deutsch from the FDT team for helping me a lot and answering all my annoying questions.

Windows Eclipse Configuration For FDT

After a lot of trouble with the Eclipse IDE I switched my JVM last night to JRockit and everything seems to be much faster now. If you have a Windows machine and an Intel CPU I can only suggest you to try the same.

I do not know if all settings are completly correct but after trying lots of different configurations this seems the be the best for me. You can find those settings in the eclipse.ini which is located in your Eclipse installation directory.


-vm PATH_TO_JROCKIT_INSTALLATION\bin\javaw.exe
-vmargs
-Xms1024M
-Xmx1024M
-XX:PermSize=256M
-XX:MaxPermSize=512M
-XX:+UseParallelGC

Sneak peak: PixelBender Development Tool

PBDT

Because the PixelBender Toolkit editor is very annoying I started writing my own some weeks ago. All I want to have is a more comfortable way to write shaders in PixelBender and I think I have achieved that already but once you start doing something you want to implement even more features until you are really satisfied.

I am really thankful that Arne from FDT was answering a lot of my questions regarding the Eclipse framework. That is also why I could implement so many features already in a short amount of time.

The current features include:

  • Syntax highlightning
  • Matching brackets highlightning which handles also < and > for metadata correct
  • Smart auto-indent strategy
  • Context sensitive auto-completion
  • Auto-insert of closing brace etc.
  • Documentation for built-in methods on hover

There are two really important issues that I still would like to address. One is the ability to highlight stuff a little bit semantic. Defined constants for instance should look different in code. And I could also add very basic live error highlightning. An outline would be nice and some content-assist features like “Create parameter …” etc.
The only downside is currently that you can not have a live-preview of your shader in Eclipse. Maybe there will be a way of doing this. I am currently not sure. Please tell me what you think and leave feature requests in the comments. I can not garuantee for anything but I will try implementing as much as possible in a reasonable timeframe.

PixelBender Outline View

PixelBender OutlinePixelBender Outline is a simple view for Eclipse. It allows you to browse through compiled PixelBender kernel files (pbj). Usually it is quite annoying when working with PixelBender. You always have to debug the shader if you did not write it yourself to know about parameters and stuff. The PixelBender Outline view allows you to navigate through that information in a comfortable way.

PixelBender Outline is working with FDT only. Just grab the JAR file and place it into your Eclipse plugins folder (…/Eclipse/plugins/) to install it. After restarting Eclipse you can open the view using Window->Show View->Other->PixelBender->PixelBender Outline.

The outline is updated everytime you select a *.pbj file in the Flash Explorer.