Acrolinx IQ support in Eclipse Plugin version?

[SSC]

Hi,

I´d like to know if the Acrolinx IQ support is also available for the Oxygen Eclipse Plugin.

And if it is supported by the Oxygen Eclipse Plugin, I´d like to know how it can be embedded?

Regards,
Simon

[Radu]

Hi Simon,

The status of a plugin for checking with Acrolinx XML files opened in Oxygen is this:

We started the implementation for such a plugin for the standalone version of Oxygen and then we agreed to give the source code to the Acrolinx developers in order for them to finish the plugin.

I think you should get in touch with Acrolinx IQ.
From what it looks like they have a beta integration between Acrolinx and Eclipse. But I think that this integration has nothing to do with Oxygen so it might not work on opened Oxygen XML files (it will definitely not work for XML files opened in the Author page).

Regards,
Radu

[SSC]

Hi Radu,

but even if we contact Acrolinx IQ, I am not sure we would be able to rebuild the functionality, which is shown in your video about the Acrolinx IQ integration.
http://www.oxygenxml.com/demo/Acrolinx_Plugin.html

How shall we handle the highlighting and edit the context-menu of the Oxygen XML Editor like it is done in the video? (Maybe your contextMenuAdditions extension point is suitable for editing the oxygen context-menu)

You managed to integrate Acrolinx IQ in the standalone client. Why then not also integrate it in the Eclipse plugin?
It´s a pity that some features are only available for the standalone client and not for the Eclipse plugin, like in my last post concerning the print preview.

[SSC]

By the way, is there a similar comparison like the one concerning the 3 different products(Editor,Developer,Author) for standalone client and Eclipse plugin?

[Radu]

Hi Simon,

You managed to integrate Acrolinx IQ in the standalone client. Why then not also integrate it in the Eclipse plugin?

It took us about 1-2 months to develop the Acrolinx plugin for the standalone application (using Swing components, pop-up menus, etc).
Then we had discussions with Acrolinx and decided to give them the source code so that they can tweak and sell the plugin themselves.
The plugin only had support for spell checking in the Author page and some Acrolinx users also wanted the Text page supported.
For now the decision to develop for such a plugin (for standalone or Eclipse) will only be on the Acrolinx side, this is what our legal departments decided.

It´s a pity that some features are only available for the standalone client and not for the Eclipse plugin, like in my last post concerning the print preview.

Yes, well regarding features like Print Preview we sometimes look what the behavior is in general for the Eclipse platform. In this case the Eclipse platform does not have Print Preview for any type of opened files.

How shall we handle the highlighting and edit the context-menu of the Oxygen XML Editor like it is done in the video? (Maybe your contextMenuAdditions extension point is suitable for editing the oxygen context-menu)

Probably more likely by adding a custom view which shows possible actions depending on the caret position.

By the way, is there a similar comparison like the one concerning the 3 different products(Editor,Developer,Author) for standalone client and Eclipse plugin?

In our full feature matrix:

http://www.oxygenxml.com/feature_matrix.html

if a feature is only in the standalone version, it has a gray bubble, if it is both in Eclipse and Standalone it has a black bubble.

Regards,
Radu

[SSC]

Probably more likely by adding a custom view which shows possible actions depending on the caret position.

That could be a solution, but it is not as pretty as the one which is shown in the video. I would rather call it a workaround when looking at the solution of the standalone client.

In our full feature matrix: [...]

Thanks for the hint, but I already knew the black and gray bubbles in the feature matrix. But unfortunately things like the print preview and plugins like Acrolinx are not mentioned in the feature matrix.

Offtopic and personal curiosity:

(using Swing components, pop-up menus, etc).

The first time I was looking through your JavaDoc I became a little bit confused when I saw swing packages in there, though you are developing an Eclipse plugin. At that time I was really curious why you do not develop everything using SWT. Isn´t it an additional expense using both Swing and SWT?

[Radu]

Hi Simon,

Thanks for the hint, but I already knew the black and gray bubbles in the feature matrix. But unfortunately things like the print preview and plugins like Acrolinx are not mentioned in the feature matrix.

Yes, it's impossible to list all possible features of the XML editor, only large features are listed there.

At that time I was really curious why you do not develop everything using SWT. Isn´t it an additional expense using both Swing and SWT?

We had this talk internally a couple of years ago, basically right now we keep as much as possible the implementation separate from the GUI so we just double the Swing dialogs, buttons, visual components by implementing SWT ones.
Basically in some areas the Swing widgets can be entirely re-written giving us greater flexibility.
For example, in order to open large XML files (30-40 MBs) we can perform tricks in the Swing text area to use less memory. In my opinion the Eclipse text widgets have never been intended for opening and working with large files (30-40 MBs for example).

Regards,
Radu