I’m very new to Eclipse and plugins, and was hoping someone could walk me through step-by-step on how to set up a plugin so that I can write/compile LUA script within Eclipse?
But now what? I am getting nowhere trying to set up a LUA file. Could you please help walk me through the next steps to actually programming? Is there is a better plugin than LunarEclipse that someone is using? I appreciate any guidance!
Personally, I use a program called SciTE for editing Lua files. It has an inbuilt Lua compiler/editor/debugger.
For writing Lua files for Vera, you don’t need to compile them - just load the source to Lua. You’d be best to look at some of the example plugins since writing Lua is the easy bit - getting all the other XML files to play nicely together is a bit more difficult and less well documented.
This looks like overkill if your intention is just to write a few lines of Lua code for Vera.
HOWEVER…
the Eclipse environment IS great for software development.
Rather than trying to assemble the pieces yourself, leverage the work done by others and go straight to [url=http://www.eclipse.org/koneki/ldt/]Archived Projects | The Eclipse Foundation where you can download a pre-compiled Eclipse/Lua image for your favourite platform. From there, it’s really easy to get a simple Lua chunk running.
What you DO have to appreciate is that unless you’re developing some cunning algorithm which is relatively self-contained, all the Lua UPnP (Luup) extensions that you need to do just about anything useful at all in Vera are going to be missing. Of course, it’s always possible to build a specific test harness which exercises the bits of your code that you need. I don’t know of a Luup ‘virtual machine’ in which you could do full Luup/Vera development. Perhaps MCV have one. Perhaps some of the real experts on the forum do. But I think the approach most used is to use Vera itself as the test environment - I’ve bought one just to do this, so it doesn’t mess around with my running systems… reboot as often as you like, no-one else will notice!
Are you sure this is really the direction in which you want to go? What’s the endgame here?
[Edit: corrected link to LDT page. Also see reply #6 above for direct download of LDT for Mac]
I am using a Mac and can’t find a free SciTe program. I was just given a Vera project that requires me to learn Lua and LUUP extensively and write thousands of lines of code, so using the MiOs test code app is not going to work.
Any walkthroughs on how to get a a nice Lua scripting program for a Mac?
@akbooer is right.
I do all of my functional code outside of Vera.
I use Emacs, a standalone lua interpreter, and some nice integration hooks between LUA and Emacs that someone wrote. I then have a LUA Syntax aware editor with tight integration with edit/test/review cycles.
I also have some dummy modules for luup to simulate some of MCV calls. But it’s never what you need … Good only for checking the calling parameters.
I actually use Emacs and Eclipse for writing Java (Android, Goolgle App Spot, …).
But the “Refactor” and “References” features are what I like the most out of IDEs like Eclipse.
will directly download and unzip the tar file for the standalone Lua Development Tools (LDT) environment.
Just click and go… and you’re on your way.
I’m deeply impressed by the “thousands of lines of code” metric - you’re certainly going to need a real debugging environment for that - can’t help wondering just WHAT is going to be that complicated??!!
If you get development with Eclipse sorted, it would be cool if you could start an article in the VeraWiki about using Eclipse for development. It’s sorely lacking in documentation.