What is your experience with third party plug-ins?

the most obvious one (for me at least!) is subclipse for subversion integration. Works very well.

I used a bit the ProRefactor and Callgraph plug-ins in OA.

Works well with 10.1A Architect, but I had some problems running it with 10.1B (I think it's the Java version it needs that causes some problems...).

As for the new Customization Editor of OA in 10.1B, it's a very good start to let us build our own plug-ins.

I'd like to be able to pass contextual values as we can with the "External tools" (let's say the selected string in the active editor). I'd also like to be able to have an easy way to modify the content of the active editor so I could do something like pass the currently selected value, build some string according to it and some user input and put that back in the editor or do some automated work on the whole file.

It could be useful to have access to the parse tree and the "id" of, for example, the selected word to be able to find it in the tree.

I'd hate to have to code in Java plug-ins to help me develop in ABL...

Has anyone used the Roundtable plug-in for OA?

"Has anyone used the Roundtable plug-in for OA?"

I use it and I think it's great.

Our plug-in for 10.1B is greatly improved over our first offering for 10.1A. One of the the cool things about our plug-in is that it adheres to the rules defined in the Roundtable repository by the administrator. Meaning that configuration control (a key component of SCM) can still be enforced.

I did a presentation of our 10.1B plug-in that is archived here on PSDN. Check it out.

The presentation COMP-5 mentions that "Schema management" is to be included in the Architect plug-in in 10.1C release. In regards to schema management, what can't I do in 10.1B that I should be able to do in 10.1C?

Hi.

One of Roundtable's unique features is the ability to manage schema as objects in a Roundtable workspace. For 10.1B plug-in, that ability does not exist yet. You can only check-out/check-in physical files only.

In 10.1C, we are developing the ability to synchronize local database modifications to the Roundtable workspace database (similar to our current Load Schema functionality) and commit those changes to the repository.

There is another presentation (the recorded variety) that is a 20 minute demo of the plug-in.

If you want to play around with it, you can download an RTB 10.1B evaluation from our web page which includes a demo repository and the current plug-in.

Hi Ant,

A lot of 3rd Party Plugins work fine with OE Architect / Eclipse. For example one of my guys downloaded AnyEdit http://andrei.gmxhome.de/anyedit/links.html

Its a tool that allows you to SaveAll open files, show hidden characters ie tabs versus spaces and change case etc. It works with any text editor including OE Architect ABL Editor.

I am trialling the Crystal Report Plugin for Eclipse - its based on J2EE but if you setup a spearate Crystal Project, then a separate OE Project and then merge the natures from the Crystal .project file into the OE .project file then it seems it functions. Mind you I haven't extensively tested it yet - so be warned.

And of course most of the Eclipse projects eg WTP - which you know gets you code snippets.

Regards

Paul

I've been examining source control plugins:

Subclipse

Serena PVCS Version Manager

Roundtable

VSS 1.6.1 plugin

Roundtable requires a higher JRE than the one out of the box with Architect.

Serena PVCS (version 8.1.3) required a different JFace plugin (Eclipse 3.1 based) but the new release (8.1.4) should resolve that. You must first add the OpenEdge project file (.project) to PVCS and than Import the project into the Workspace from the PVCS menu that appears in OEA.

Subclipse and VSS worked after install like desired.

Thanks Paul

One thing I hoped to get from this thread was what plug-ins were actually being used and for what - useful data whilst researching what SDLC capabilities are required for OpenEdge Architect going forward - based on popularity and demand.

Lack of responses indicate people are happy with what we provide already and have not found the need to use additional plug-ins

I have the OE Architect plug-ins set up as an extension to a separate Eclipse instance, where I have installed quite a few 3P plug-ins including the following.

Subclipse

Eclipse Web Standard Tools (WST)

Orangevolt XSLT

Eclipse Java Development Tools (JDT)

External Diff Tool

Eclipse Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT)

Except for Subclipse, the other 3P plug-ins are used for non-ABL work that is either XML-centric in nature (XSLT, WSDL editing) or Java development. I also have the Sonic Workbench in its own Eclipse instance, but haven't done much development there yet.

All of the above seem to coexist quite happily with the OE Architect plug-ins without issues, but I haven't found many cases where I really needed more synergy among them. One possible exception is that many of our projects and code repositories now include ABL and non-ABL code (Java, XSLT, ...); and it would be nice to combine them into the same Eclipse project with the full OEA build capabilities, rather than using an 'OpenEdge Project' for the ABL and a different project for the others.

In my opinion, the best single thing that Progress could do for its plug-in suite would be to make the Debugger plug-in fully functional and absolutely ironclad in its support for various run-time environments (AppServer, TTY) from within the IDE. Given the interactive debugging capabilities in Visual Studio and Eclipse JDT, the bar for 'good' debuggers is set very high these days, and the Debugger plug-in is painful to use compared to these others. However, at this point I know I am wandering off-topic and will hold Debugger comments for another time and place.

Regards,

Fred

I'm curious about how you got the Crystal Plugin to produce anything at all. After installation I don't have any Crystal Perspectives nor any Crystal Project Wizards. In fact the only clue that the cr4e plugin is installed at all is that there are entries in Window/Preferences/Crystal Reports for Crystal Report Viewers. I'm at a loss as to how to start a new Crystal Project.

I'm not sure about the Crystal Reports plugin. But a few plugins that I tested run much better in a standard Eclipse 3.3 (Europe) environment where I have linked the OpenEdge Architect feature to.

I guess some dependencies to standard Java packages are missing in Progresses deployment.

Mike

Very interesting plug-in for MDA is Acceleo. Plug-in itself is free, along with the basic documentation but you must pay for the proffesional documentation. There is a lot of options and it's fairly easy to create your own templates for code generation. This tool "cooperates" very well with the Topcased UML, nice free UML tool.

Another nice plug-in (or set of plug-ins) is Polarion Subversion. It's bundled version of Subversion with all necesary prerequisites plus Subversive and FastTrack plugins for Eclipse. It mostly does the similar as the combination of Bugzilla and Subversion with quite nice UI (through Eclipse) and has some nice features like check-in policies etc. There is also a commercial version with lot more options.

A great plugin we use for JavaScript/Ajax/Webspeed-HTML/PHP,CSS aso. is from Aptana.

InstallLink: http://update.aptana.com/install/3.2/

Includes Samples for Adobe Spry/Air, Snippets, Scripts and much more.

An another JS-Editor is available from Adobe , installlink: http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/jseclipse/autoinstall

I failed to install PVCS Commander Eclipse Plugin http://sourceforge.net/projects/pvcscommander, with the following error:

"Unable to create the selected preference page

Reason:

Plugin com.eatcodensleep.plugin.pvcscommander was unable to load class

com.eatcodensleep.plugin.pvcscommnander.preferences.PvcsCommanderPreferencePage."