Plan for Ed Averill

API overkill, or "how complex can it get?"

Well, my Eclipse plugin programming book and my SWT/JFace books arrived a while ago, and I will have to say that developing a commercial-grade plugin suite is a bit more complex than I had originally anticipated! Even though it's all in Java, there might be places I'll need to implement bits in C or C++, although I'm not sure I can't coerce Java to do what I need (mainly controlling spawning off the various tools, monitoring the progress of the compiler, and things like that).

I've started looking at the code for the CDT Eclipse plugins (on the eclipse.org/cdt page), this is a suite that supports C/C++ development and might be a reasonable jumping-off point, and if nothing else should be worth studying to see how others have attacked the problem.

It's certainly not a days or weeks project, this looks to be in the months range, at least if I want to do a "proper" job on it, and I certainly want to make this the best I can.

The design is in flux as I'm learning more about how perspectives, editors, and various parts of Eclipse work and how to wire new things into it - I can definitely say I'll have editors for C, C++, and Torquescript at a minimum, and that I'll support GCC and the Microsoft .NET free compiler. I'll also support Subversion for version control, and for content pipeline I'll support Milkshape, Blender, Paint Shop Pro, Quark, and the GIMP as part of the first release. Hopefully I can find a way to allow a configurable pipeline that will allow each shop to define/configure/arrange the tools they use, instead of having to either use what I give 'em or make them hack the Java plugin source to add tools (blech). Additional fun I'm not looking forward to is convering the makefile system to Ant build scripts (shudder), but I consider makefiles evil and am willing to make that effort. I also want to write a "Torque Project Wizard" that will put together a skeleton project with the engine and a basic script framework, although I'm not sure that's worth the effort - it's on the list as a learning experience, although near the bottom priority-wise.

Oh well, back to work! Where's my coffee...