[Gambas-devel] Add-ins

[Tobias Boege]

On Thu, 04 Sep 2014, John Leake wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> Background
> ----------
> I have been a self-employed software engineer for more than 30-years and
> it is now time to give something back to the open-source community.
>

Very nice!

>
> I have written in several languages over the years but mainly C, VB (M$
> vb2 through to vb6) and Ruby.
> 
> Relevance
> ---------
> My vb work extended into custom controls and add-ins that enhanced the
> IDE with single-click insertion/removal of syslog call templates,
> copyright notices and software version control history.
> 
> Does the IDE support Add-Ins ?
> If not which are the relevant source modules ?
> 

Do you use "add-in" in the sense that you want to augment the official IDE
source code, and _not_ provide an (un)loadable, optional module ("add-on")
which may or may not be contained in the source tree?

I'm no expert of the IDE (I haven't fully explored the GUI yet after six
years with Gambas) but I don't think there are designated interfaces for
either interpretation. (With some advanced Gambas+OOP knowledge it should
be possible to implement a framework for the latter, though.)

However, with near zero idea about the IDE, I wrote the Patch dialogs you
can find in there today (menu Project -> Patch). It was (nearly) as easy
as writing the code[*] and dropping it into a separate folder in the source
code.

[*] This involved searching and reading _quite some_ code of the IDE itself
    (which is the thing with add-ins), of course, but it's still pretty
    straight-forward once you're into it a little.

First you need to clone the Gambas sources [0], then the IDE sources are at
app/src/gambas3.

Regards,
Tobi

[0] http://gambaswiki.org/wiki/howto/svn

-- 
"There's an old saying: Don't change anything... ever!" -- Mr. Monk