Visage
- by Geertjan
Raj, the Chennai JUG lead, together with others from that JUG, is interested in Visage, the JavaFX script language closely associated with Stephen Chin.
He sent me the related lexer and parser and I started by having a look at them in the new version of ANTLRWorks being developed by Sam Harwell (who demonstrated it very effectively during JavaOne):
Notice how the lexer and parser are shown in a tree structure, as well as in a cool syntax diagram.
Next, I downloaded a bunch of JARs from here, so that packages such as from "com.sun.tools.mjavac" can be used, i.e., these are Visage-specific packages that aren't found anywhere except in the location below:
http://code.google.com/p/visage/wiki/GettingStarted
It turns out that there's also a Visage NetBeans plugin out there:
http://code.google.com/p/visage/source/browse/?repo=netbeans-plugin
Rather than recreating everything from scratch, i.e., generating ANTLR Java classes from the lexer and parser, I copied a lot of stuff from the site above and now a file Raj sent me looks as follows, i.e., basic syntax coloring is shown:
For anyone wanting to seriously support Visage in NetBeans IDE, I recommend downloading the existing Visage NetBeans plugin above, rather than creating everything yourself from scratch, and then figuring out how to use that code in some way, i.e., add the JARs I pointed to above, and work on its build.xml file, which could be frustrating in the beginning, but there's no point in recreating everything if everything already exists.
