Programmers these days have to remember so many acronyms and abbreviations. I am very sorry for people asking me what i do. Right after the first couple of words i loose their attention, even when they would like to know. In this post i want to give a quick introduction on five of them.
ASDT is Action Script Development Tool. Its a project I am working on for years now. It is, as the name says a tool that enables you to develop ActionScript. ActionScript is a programming language for Flash. In many cases i need to add "Flash is the thing that makes ads annoying" than they get connect. AS3 is a abbreviation for ActionScript 3 - the latest version of the language.
My work on ASDT included building a grammar and some other language analysis for ActionScript 2. And now i plan on writing an AS3 editor for ASDT. I learned a lot about this topic in these years. I started to look at ANTLR (ANother Tool for Language Recognition) back then. However, at that time I mostly focused on parsing an AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) with offset info. But when i started working and thinking about a higher level of language analysis like cross-file references, error recovery or incremental parsing, I soon realized that a handcrafted approach for these problem was not possible in terms of development time and brain capacity. This month a new Eclipse project will upload its codebase to the servers: Eclipse IMP. Eclipse IMP is an IDE(Integrated Development Environment) and framework for building other IDEs. As far as I know it was a research project at IBM for some in-house languages. Now it will join Eclipse and I am very happy about that. Today I finally found some spare time to get the pre-release codebase at sourceforge up and running. I am more than impressed and believe that the code release this month will be even more impressive. I decided to start right now with learning LPG (LARL Parser Generator - formally known as JikesPG) because it is used by IMP and it has big advantages for the work i want to do, like better error recovery mechanisms. The big advantage of ANTLR - syntactic sugar - is not relevant in this case.
Eclipse IMP also has plans to utilize EMF (Eclipse Modelling Framework) and WALA (WAtson Libraries for Analysis). I also had thought about using EMF, it can serialize the AST and supports cross-file references - that is perfect. And WALA seems to be the part of language analysis i had no idea how to build.
I can't give any estimate, but i think development of a decent AS3 Editor will be much, much faster with these kinds of tools around. I will keep you informed.
I like you work in asdt very much it is so wonderful, I wanted to add actionscript3 support for your project but I was astonished of how big is your work I thought that it will be easier. but anyway Are you working on extending your work to support actionscript 3??
and also do you have any documentation for your work or even how did you start the project, and what is the approach you are taking. Please don't stop your wonderful project.
Hi Yahya, thanks for your kind words. You are of course welcome to develop asdt. just drop me a mail and i will grant you svn write access.
i still want to work on it, but reality is a harsh mistress: i currently study cs and try to get my business running. asdt just wont fit in between right now.
i am very ashamed for the undocumented code, but whenever you've got a serious question about the code, i can look into it.
yes, my model code is bloated. i tried to build some analysis into it but failed in the process- it just grew over my head. thats why i looked into Eclipse IMP and some similar projects. I think its the only way to manage this kind of workload.
however never be scared. a simple editor with coloring and folding, etc. is fun. I recommend to dive into the eclipse apis if you can spare a month or two. I learned soo much during asdt development.
Don't hesitate to email me at mb0@mb0.org