ProvideX CONNEXION

The NEW ProvideX Eclipse Plug-in!

By Jarett Smith

Put familiar ProvideX features at your fingertips in an industry standard IDE!

We are very excited to announce our new ProvideX Eclipse Plug-in! With Eclipse, you’ll find application development faster and easier than ever before.

What’s Eclipse?

Eclipse is an open source community where projects are focused on providing an extensible development platform and application frameworks for building software. For more information, visit: www.eclipse.org

Eclipse Plug-ins

The Eclipse functionality can be expanded by installing plug-ins that anyone can build and distribute. Typically, the end user downloads Eclipse from www.eclipse.org, and then extends Eclipse by downloading plug-ins from third parties. Currently, there are hundreds (possibly thousands) of Eclipse plug-ins available. You can view a partial list of available plug-ins at: http://www.eclipseplugincentral.com/Web_Links+main.html

ProvideX Eclipse Plug-in

The ProvideX Eclipse Plug-in implements a good deal of the Eclipse framework, enabling the development of ProvideX applications in Eclipse. The ProvideX plug-in adds a ProvideX project, nature, and perspective to the Eclipse Workbench as well as a number of views, editors, wizards, builders, and tools. The ProvideX Eclipse Plug-in comprises a number of Java Jar files that are installed in the Eclipse Plug-in directory, plus ProvideX programs.

ProvideX Eclipse Plug-in Features

Welcome: Links to ProvideX Overview, tutorials, and samples through the Welcome page.

ProvideX Project Wizard: Create a ProvideX project using the New ProvideX Project Wizard.

ProvideX Perspective comprises the following views:

1. Navigator – Browses ProvideX projects
2. PVC Outline – Displays a file’s key information when a keyed file is selected
3. Problems – Shows errors and warnings
4. Console – Provides information on running builders and programs
5. Properties – Contains your resource information
6. Tasks – Adds tasks and associates them with a resource
7. NOMADS – Displays the panels, queries, and popup menus
8. Embedded Dictionary – Contains the embedded IO list information
9. Search – Offers great support for searching projects and files

Resources: ProvideX programs imported into a ProvideX project are converted to ASCII text source files. Passwords are saved with the source file. ProvideX keyed files, and other resources such as images, are marked as resources and processed appropriately by the ProvideX builder. Passwords and owner codes can be shared with ProvideX projects in other workspaces using import/export wizards.

ProvideX Editor: The ProvideX Editor is an advanced text editor with dedicated features for ProvideX source code development. It is tightly integrated with the ProvideX PVC Outline view, which changes as the structure of the ProvideX source code that’s being edited changes. The Editor provides configurable syntax highlighting. The following ProvideX elements are rendered in unique colors and text styles (such as bold and italics): comments, directives, line labels, literals, mnemonics, operators, system functions, and system variables.

ProvideX Builder: This generates compiled ProvideX programs from ASCII source files and applies passwords and owner codes. When a resource is built, the ProvideX builder scans each resource and compiles or copies the resource from the project's input directory to the project's output directory. Files that contain ProvideX source code are compiled. And other resources like data files, libraries, images, and more, are examined and copied to the output directory. The ProvideX builder generates a Document Object Model (DOM) for every resource in a ProvideX project. The DOM is used to display: key and data dictionary information for keyed files, functions and attributes for ProvideX class files, line labels for ProvideX programs, panels, queries, and popup menus defined in the ProvideX library.