∞ /notes/zest-project-type-with-dot-support | 2009-06-28 | graphviz programming eclipse soc zest

Zest project type with DOT support

Cross-posted to: https://fsteeg.wordpress.com/2009/06/28/zest-project-type-with-dot-support/

I've completed the fourth milestone of my Google Summer of Code project at Eclipse. It adds a Zest project type with support for Graphviz DOT templates in a dedicated folder. These DOT files are automatically compiled to Zest graph subclasses. Details can be found on the dot4zest Eclipse wiki page.

While implementing this functionality I've also updated and streamlined the DotImport API by adding methods taking IFile parameters for all of the provided functionality (importing DOT, checking for errors, and some minor other things).

Between this and the previous milestone, the Eclipse world has taken a significant step forward with the release of Eclipse 3.5 and the Galileo simultaneous release. I was very happy to see that after some minor tweaks, my bundles work just fine on Galileo, so I made the move and switched to Galileo.

With Galileo, most of the oAW dependencies I rely on are now part of the Eclipse release train (in particular Xtext and Xpand). However, I also depend on the oAW Graphviz feature, which is not in Galileo. So for now this project still depends on oAW (and I was pleased to see that oAW works flawlessly with Galileo).

I've also found some time to write unit tests for both wizards (the project wizard introduced with this milestone and the graph wizard introduced with milestone 3). I just love running unit tests for UI elements: seeing the things that are usually triggered by clicking around happen all by themselves (like wizards popping up, editors opening, etc.) is just magic.