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Vala plugin news

nospam@example.com (Abderrahim Kitouni) — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 02:02:33 -0800

Hi all,

there are some new things in the repository about the vala plugin of anjuta. I'll try to make a release as soon as I finish a last little thing and get all the needed patches included in libvala.

meanwhile, you can play with it (apply the patch in bug 542920, and change the last "return false;" to "return sym1.get_full_name () == sym2.get_full_name ();" I'll try to fix it).

If you make it crash, send me a backtrace, and I'll try to fix it

GDB Vala support

nospam@example.com (Abderrahim Kitouni) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 09:58:01 -0700

Hi,

I've just uploaded my latest patch to add Vala support to gdb.
It works mostly ok, and I'd like more feedback on it.
You can get it from here. (apply it against gdb 6.8 )

It's almost over

nospam@example.com (Abderrahim Kitouni) — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 08:07:00 -0700

Summer of code is almost over, and I think I'm on track for completing my project.

Now, more about what I've been doing lately :

The next step in my project is Vala debugging support for Anjuta. I tried to work directly on gdb so that others can use it even if not using anjuta. Here are the results as a small demo video.

So what do you think of this? Of course you can try it yourself : get the patch from here, and apply it on gdb 6.8.

There are still some things to clean, some things to add, but I think it's useable now. the main thing to add is printing of values (now it uses the C), and the main thing to add is accessing private fields directly (i.e. obj.privfield instead of obj.priv.privfield).

P.S: I'll try to prepare a video using Anjuta.

Anjuta-valaplugin 0.2

nospam@example.com (Abderrahim Kitouni) — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 02:03:22 -0700

Another release of my Vala plugin for anjuta is available. The patch for libvala I've posted earlier are still needed.
This release features :
* completion based on return types of methods.
* showing errors in anjuta ui (only red underline right now).
* call tips.
* fixed completion popup alignment.
* various fixes.
* a dozen more warnings on compilation :-p

I'd love to put a screenshot, but I'm not on my pc right now.

Anyway, I consider code completion mostly done, and will be concentrating on other things (I'll try to add Vala support to the debugger). If you feel something is missing or if you find a bug, feel free to send feedback.

first release of the Vala plugin for Anjuta

nospam@example.com (Abderrahim Kitouni) — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 08:45:00 -0700

I'm pleased to announce the first release of my Anjuta plugin featuring code completion for Vala.

You can get a tarball from here. You'll also need a patched version of vala : GCompletion binding, public Vala.Scope.symbol_table (maybe should be read only, there is also another small change that removes a warning), better source_reference for Vala.Block and support for error reporting in anjuta ui (not included in the plugin). (I'll bug Jürg later to include them.
The plugin compiles with a dozen warnings (about ignored errors) so don't worry about it.
to compile : make && make install, it needs to install in the same prefix as Anjuta, so you may need to install as root.

If you have any suggestions, bug reports or other feedback, don't hesitate. Meanwhile, I'll be working on call tips.

Vala support for ctags

nospam@example.com (Abderrahim Kitouni) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 08:11:00 -0700

It's been a long time since I've posted anything, and the last thing I've posted was about vala support for ctags. The good news is : it's done.

I'm pleased to announce the first release of vala support for (exuberant) ctags. It supports every vala tag kind I'm aware of, and most exuberant ctags extensions. And since it's based on libvala, it also supports Genie. Vala was tested with the entire libvala code, and genie was only tested with the two examples on Jamie's blog (but this should be sufficient as it uses libvala)

What's missing now is the ability to produce pattern based tag entries (only line number is supported), and tag scope (such as namespace and class name for a field).

You can get a tarball (based on latest svn of exuberant ctags), or patches : against exuberant ctags and against anjuta's local copy, both svn versions.

Update: The exuberant ctags based version needs to be configured with --enable-vala
Update 2 : I've just updated the tarball because it had a problem (I forgot to run aclocal)

And since a screenshot is better than talk, here is one:

Start of coding

nospam@example.com (Abderrahim Kitouni) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 09:38:00 -0700

I just finished my last exam (well there is still one left, but it won't slow me down), so I'm going to start working on my GSoC project.

Right now I'm trying to add vala support to exuberant ctags, by wrapping the libvala parser (as a, rather pleasant, side effect : support for Genie will be there as well).

After that, I think I'm going to tackle code completion, and hopefully have something useable by the end of June.

That's all. If you have any ideas or feedback, you can leave comments.

Writing Anjuta plugins in Vala

nospam@example.com (Abderrahim Kitouni) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 09:50:00 -0700

Update : this is now bug 538021
Since I had a break from my exams (next is on monday), I wrote a little tutorial about writing Anjuta plugins in Vala, it is still incomplete.
I'm posting it here before sending a patch to have more visibility and hopefully someone can proofread it. I'm not really confident about it's quality (and this is the first time I'm writing a software documentation).
Enough speaking, Here you go :

Writing plugins in Vala

Before writing an Anjuta plugin, please read Anjuta Architecture for general concepts about how Anjuta plugins interact with Anjuta Shell and other plugins. Anjuta API is divided in two namespaces : Anjuta and IAnjuta. Anjuta contains API to interact with the IDE, and IAnjuta contains interfaces that plugins implement to be able to interact with each other. Writing a plugin for Anjuta is as simple as subclassing Anjuta.Plugin, overriding activate and deactivate, and writing a .plugin file to let Anjuta know about your plugin. This tutorial is still uncomplete. However most of the documentation regarding C plugins is still applicable, so you can always refer to Writing plugins. In this tutorial, we will write a basic Hello world plugin that does nothing but adding a "Hello World" label to Anjuta.

Writing the plugin code

As said earlier, we will need to subclass Anjuta.Plugin and override some methods, so here is Anjuta.Plugin :

public class Anjuta.Plugin : GLib.Object {
public uint add_watch (string name, Anjuta.PluginValueAdded added, Anjuta.PluginValueRemoved removed);
public bool is_active ();
public void remove_watch (uint id, bool send_remove);
public virtual bool activate ();
public virtual bool deactivate ();
public weak Anjuta.Shell shell { get; set; }
public signal void activated ();
public signal void deactivated ();
}

The methods we'll need to override are activate and deactivate, the shell property is what we'll use to interact with Anjuta. add_watch and remove_watch are used to interface with the Values System see Anjuta Architecture for more information. The rest is pretty self explanatory, and we generally won't need it. We will only use the add_widget method of Anjuta.Shell in this tutorial. For more informations, you can see the C API documentation. This plugin does nothing more than showing a "Hello World" widget in Anjuta

using Gtk;
using Anjuta;
public class HelloWorldPlugin: Plugin {
/* The hello world widget */
Widget widget;
/* We use the "override" keyword to override the virtual methods activate and deactivate */
public override bool activate () {
widget = new Label("Hello World");
/* adding the widget */
shell.add_widget(widget, /* the widget to add */
"AnjutaHelloWorldPlugin", /* name of the widget */
"HelloWorldPlugin", /* title, should be translated */
Gtk.STOCK_ABOUT, /* icon stock id */
ShellPlacement.CENTER); /* placement in in the shell */
return true; /* false if activation failed */
}
public override bool deactivate () {
/* remove the widget we've added */
shell.remove_widget(widget);
return true; /* false if plugin doesn't want to deactivate */
}
}
/* Initialization function, in C this would be automatically generated by the
ANJUTA_SIMPLE_PLUGIN macro */
[ModuleInit]
public GLib.Type anjuta_glue_register_components (GLib.TypeModule module) {
return typeof (HelloWorldPlugin);
}

Writing a plugin description

Anjuta needs a file with a plugin extension to know about our plugin, its name and description, where it is located, when to load it. Here is an example for our basic plugin :

[Anjuta Plugin]
Name=Hello World
Description=An example hello world plugin.
Location=anjuta-hello-world:HelloWorldPlugin
Icon=anjuta-sample-plugin-48.png

Generally, Name and Description should be translated. Using intltool, you can do this by prefixing them with _. Location is of the form libraryname:ClassName : libraryname is the name of the library file (without the lib prefix and .so suffix), and ClassName is the full class name including the namespace (and not separated by a period as you would write it in Vala). Icon is the icon to be used by the plugin, here we put sample plugin icon which is distributed along with Anjuta, but you could put your own icon instead. For more information about plugin description files, refer to Plugin description file.

Compiling and installing the plugin

Manual compilation

Assuming you saved the plugin as hello-plugin.vala, you can compile it with :

valac --ccode --pkg libanjuta-1.0 hello-plugin.vala
gcc -shared -o libanjuta-hello-world.so hello-plugin.c

Using autotools

Coming soon.

You can get the vapi (and deps) for Anjuta from my mercurial repository (direct links : vapi, deps), add --vapidir /path/to/libanjuta-1.0.vapi to valac command line.

Hello, World

nospam@example.com (Abderrahim Kitouni) — Tue, 20 May 2008 10:03:00 -0700

Update: Hello, Planet Gnome

This is my first blog post, which I created to follow the progress of Summer of Code project.

My project is about adding Vala support to Anjuta, I'll be mentored by Jürg Billeter.

I've setup a mercurial repository at freehg, if you want to see the progress (right now there is only a skeleton, but I understand Anjuta plugin architecture, so the next step is to start writing the actual code)

I'm going to have exams shortly, so I won't be able to work on this until June, 10th.

Anyway, If you have any feature request, you can use comments