LDT & Koneki, Top Eclipse Juno Feature #9

As Eclipse sprints towards another release – Eclipse Juno – I’m counting down the Top 10 Features that I’m most excited about.  As I mentioned yesterday, this is the 5th time I’ve compiled my Top 10 List.  I put these lists together for two reasons.  The first reason is to let the community know about the New and Noteworthy things in Eclipse this year.  The second reason is a selfish one;  it forces me to learn about exciting projects in the Eclipse ecosystem.  Number 9 on my Top 10 List, Lua Development Tools and the Koneki Project, certainly falls into the second category.

Eclipse was designed as a tooling platform for everything and nothing in particular. The Eclipse platform provides a solid base for teams to develop high quality tool support for all types of programming languages_._ Eclipse based IDEs have been created for many of the industry dominant programming languages, including PHP, Java, C/C++, JavaScript, etc… While these languages dominate the mainstream, many highly specialized languages are emerging. Lua, a popular scripting language for games and embedded devices (currently ranked 20 on the Tiobe programming index) is a great example of this.

The Eclipse Juno will include first release of the Lua Development Tools (LDT).

The LDT provides Lua Syntax Highlighting:

An interactive remote debugger:

TODO Markers and Tags:

Content-assist:

You can even setup an external tool configuration and run Lua scripts directly in the eclipse console:

The Lua Development Tools was built using the Eclipse Dynamic Languages Toolkit, an extensible framework designed to reduce the complexity of building full featured development environments for dynamic languages. While the LDT is pretty cool, the ability for tool developers to quickly create such hight quality tools, reinforces the original design objectives of Eclipse.   I’m personally really excited to see Eclipse growing in so many different directions.

Thanks goes out to Benjamin Cabe, Kevin KIN_FOO and Simon Bernard for the great work!