Perl for Eclipse

brian_d_foy on 2006-08-06T00:23:00

The eclipse-perl integration project has made an impressive come back from a long time of very low activity:

After more than two years since the last release, an updated version of EPIC is now available. This version works with Eclipse 3.2, has a completely rewritten parser, many bug fixes and several new features (see ChangeLog). At this point, the stable and testing versions are identical. However, new features will be only provided through the testing version, while stable will be updated only with bug fixes. Both versions can be installed and kept up-to-date using Eclipse's Update Manager.

See the changelog for bug fixes and new features

We've been using EPIC for more than two years now and this looks like this'll get us a lot of productivity for free.

Love. Hate.

jk2addict on 2006-08-04T20:51:22

On one hand, I love the new stuff. It works a lot better than past versions. On the other hand, I can still just get things done quicker in a text editor without all the fluff.

The one thing that still turns me away from Eclipse/EPIC and Komodo is the intellisense is never up to par %100 of the time. I know that's a hard thing to do with perl, but it's still my longstanding gripe about Perl IDEs.

Re:Love. Hate.

sigzero on 2006-08-04T21:35:49
I think they should go the way of RadRails. They should do their own release (not the whole eclipse distro) just something that is Perl specific and is geared toward supporting a framework like Catalyst.

I just tried RadRails and it is pretty good. Something Perl specific and focusing on a framework would be cool.
Re:Love. Hate.

malte on 2006-08-05T19:53:51

I usually have Eclipse and BBEdit open simultaneously and switch back and forth all the time.

The one feature I'd really love to have would be "File renaming/moving"->"Package-Renaming" and the other way around, plus renaming the class everywhere it's used. Most Java IDEs have this feature and fail miserably with all those damn XML config files. I guess we'd have the same problem since our MVC framework stores the controller config in an sql database.

Yay

kwilliams on 2006-08-06T17:35:31

I have high hopes for the EPIC project - we use Eclipse a lot at work for Java code, and with its sophisticated refactoring, etc., Java becomes in some ways more agile for development than Perl. Not good.

Hopefully this new release will narrow the tool gap some, and help me convince other people in my group to use Perl for our projects.

-Ken