IDEA "platform"? Constructing on top of the scala plug-in?

Hi Hanns,

You can do what you want with IntelliJ Platform. Basically, it specifically target the task of building IDEs and provides ready-to-use infrastructure for that. IDEA, RubyMine, PhpStorm and MPS are already built on top of it; PyCharm is coming soon.

Of course you'll need some time to get familiar with IntelliJ concepts and API but the platform is open-source itself, so, you can just check-out it and get full information about the processing. There is a documentation for it but there are still ways to expand and improve it, so, feel free to contribute.

Regarding GUI tookit used - IntelliJ Platform is built on standard Swing framework.

Denis

Hello Hanns,

The IntelliJ Platform is not a general-purpose RCP - it's designed for developing
IDEs. If the application you're trying to write looks like an IDE, you may
be able to use the IntelliJ Platform and the Scala plugin. If not, NetBeans
will likely be a better fit. (Also, you'll likely find that the NetBeans
platform is better documented.)

IntelliJ IDEA is based on Swing and doesn't currently use any native code
for its UI rendering.

i am evaluating since a while the possibility to construct an
application that works with scala code and scala code fragments on any
of the IDE's or their RCPs.

in the beginning, i looked at eclipse, but the plugin is still far too
fragile and my frustration was far too big, so the second thing i
looked at was netbeans. the big pro for me is to be able to directly
use Swing components.

however, definitely IDEA has the most outstanding scala plug-in, a
magnitude better than the other two, and now that there is the CE, it
also an option for my as open source developer.

so my question is: is it possible to kind of develop rich clients on
top of IDEA, something similiar to the eclipse RCP or netbeans
platform? i understand that i could extend IDEA by writing plug-ins.
would i be able to incorporate the scale plug-in to render my code
fragments, if possible with all the bells+whistles, maybe more modules
like project management? or would you recommend to launch such an
endeavour better with netbeans? (BTW: what gui toolkit is idea based
on? it looks fairly native and is very responsive....?)

thanks for any thoughts on this. best,

Dmitry Jemerov
Development Lead
JetBrains, Inc.
http://www.jetbrains.com/
"Develop with Pleasure!"

thanks denis and dmitry!

that's good news. i will try to investigate, if i feel able to learn the API in reasonable time. in fact, my app _will_ look like an IDE, so i just mentioned RCP to say that it might be a reduced-down thing, not the full IDE. i found eclipse rather well documented, but the whole thing a too big monster, and i hated to be forced into learning SWT, so i'm happy that IDEA is swing based...

best, .h.h.

Cool, keep us posted!