When I originally set out to enable scriptable plug-ins, my intention was to expose special extension points that would accept scripts.  It wasn’t long before it occurred to me, however, that with some fancy footwork I should be able to write a standard Eclipse plug-in with script!  This will be a great boon because then I won’t have to redefine any of the possible extension points (and believe me, there are a lot in Eclipse), or deal with any of the attendant problems of maintaining such a mess.  It’s been a real power struggle trying to resolve class loading issues, but I finally have a working plug-in.  It consists of only three files: MANIFEST.MF (which manages dependencies), plugin.xml (which manages extension points), and script.js (which is my Javascript code).  Once I have everything working how I want it, I’ll put together a quick tutorial on writing scripted plug-ins.

Eventually I’d like to make it even simpler by letting the user write scripts from within Genesis and not have to mess with any MANIFEST.MF or plugin.xml files, but there are more important things to work on right now.  This alone should significantly lower the barrier to entry.

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