Ketan's Musings

As a java developer who is starting to use ruby and javascript for a lot of things lately — there is one thing I miss most. An embedded shell/interpreter for eclipse!

An embedded console or an interpreter is a very powerful tool, it allows you to do some very interesting things with your software as it is running, play around with it, tweak it and anything else you can ever imagine. All of this without the edit-save-compile-relaunch cycle.

Lately I’ve been working on an embedded console for eclipse. The primary motivation was to try out scripting approaches for SWTBot. But I soon realized that I was using it for more than just scripting tests. I was using it to learn how eclipse works, try out different approaches to decide which one is best.

Some of the features include code completion, history lookup. This is possible using jruby’s objectspace and the readline support.

Here’s a small teaser video of what you can do with it an embedded jruby console for eclipse.

The update site url is here http://dl.swtbot.org/update-site

The example here uses SWTBot APIs. But there’s nothing stopping you from using anything else in any of your other plugins.