Eclipse presents a wealth of capabilities for building tools for compiled languages like C and the Java™ programming language, but provides little support for scripting languages like Perl, Python, and PHP. For these and similar languages, the Eclipse Dynamic Languages Toolkit (DLTK) comes to the rescue. Walk through the process of building a DLTK-based IDE and discover sample code for each step.

In this tutorial

This tutorial shows how Eclipse's DLTK makes it possible to build development tools for scripting languages. In particular, it explains how to implement syntax coloring, user preferences, and interpreter integration in a plug-in-based project.

Prerequisites

This tutorial is written for Java developers familiar with Eclipse and interested in building tools for dynamic languages, such as PHP, Tcl, Ruby, and Python. It assumes you have a basic understanding of plug-ins and Eclipse-based development tools in general.

System requirements

To build the example project in this tutorial, you need a computer with an Eclipse installation (V3.4 or later) and a current Java Runtime Environment (JRE). You must install a recent version of the DLTK, which we describe in the section "Install the DLTK."

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