We recently released 0.3 of the Scripted Editor, and we are making fast progress towards our next release. One of the major goals of Scripted Editor 0.4 is extensibility and part of the extensibility story is a simple, extensible templating mechanism (the other part is a powerful plugin model, which will be described in a future blog post). In this post, I will introduce custom code completions and templates for the Scripted editor.

Sublime Text is an excellent, general purpose editor. It is highly configurable and many users of Scripted also use Sublime. Because of this, we want to make extensions to Sublime compatible with Scripted where it makes sense. One of these areas is sublime-completions files. These files specify lists of completions for a given content type (typically mapped to file…

UPDATE, Nov 23: We have released STS 2.8.1, that fixes many of the install/uninstall of m2eclipse issues that people were having. Read the release announcement. Now, it is possible to upgrade/downgrade m2eclipse easily. STS 2.8.1 fully supports both versions of m2eclipse.

Today, we released version 2.8.0 of the SpringSource Tool Suite. Along with an update to Eclipse Indigo SR1 (which brings you full IDE support for Java7), we also updated the Maven integration from the old and unmaintained m2eclipse versions 0.12.x to the latest version m2e 1.0 – which is now shipping as part of the…

Not too long ago, I introduced DSL descriptors (DSLDs) for Groovy-Eclipse. DSLDs are Groovy scripts that provide rich editing support (content assist, navigation, etc.) for Groovy projects in your Eclipse workspace. Since DSLDs can only be executed inside a running Eclipse process, debugging is not as simple as firing up the Eclipse debugger and stepping through a Groovy script. In this post, I'll describe some simple and some more complex techniques that you can use for debugging your DSLDs.

To get all of this working, you will need the latest development builds:

• Groovy-Eclipse: http://dist.codehaus.org/groovy/distributions/greclipse/snapshot/e3.7/
• STS Grails Tooling (optional, for debug evaluations): http://dist.springsource.com/snapshot/TOOLS/nightly/e3.7
• AJDT (optional, for debug evaluations): http://download.eclipse.org/tools/ajdt/37/update

Simple and crude

The simplest and crudest way to debug your DSLDs is by using println. This will print expressions to the standard out of the running Eclipse process, which can be seen if you launched your Eclipse from the command line. However, I recommend using a log statement instead. This will print logging information to the Groovy event console…

The Groovy language is an excellent platform for creating domain specific languages (DSLs). A good DSL can make programs more concise and expressive as well as make programmers more productive. However, until now these DSLs were not directly supported by Groovy-Eclipse in the editor. When DSLs are used heavily, standard IDE features like content assist, search, hovers, and navigation lose their value. For a while now, it has been possible to write an Eclipse plugin to extend Groovy-Eclipse, but this is a heavy-weight approach that requires specific knowledge of the Eclipse APIs. Now that…

We have included some big improvements to Groovy Debugging in the recent release of the SpringSource Tool Suite 2.5.1. It has always been possible to debug your Groovy applications using Eclipse's vanilla debug support for Java, but due to Groovy's language differences from Java and its metaprogramming, many debug features have not been working as well as they could.

All of the screenshots in this post were taken from a simple Grails app and so the debug features here are implicitly making use of dynamically added Groovy methods and properties.

Step Into

With the enhanced Groovy debug support, the…