Introducing ErlangX and ErlangXCode
Saturday, October 4, 2008 at 16:06 by Jón Grétar Borgþórsson I just started 2 little projects called ErlangX and ErlangXCode.
ErlangX is basically an installation of the Erlang/OTP system. Basically it is installed in 2 locations. in /Library/Frameworks/Erlang.framework we have the standard Erlang installation with the standard libraries. In /Library/Erlang/lib there are a few other popular libraries preinstalled for you. In there would also go other libraries you would like to install system wide.
Erlang will also look into the directory /Users/USERNAME/Library/Erlang/lib/ for modules if it exists. These are for libraries you want only accessible to a single user.
Even though ErlangX is installed into /Library/Frameworks/Erlang.framework it is not yet set up as a real Cocoa framework. There are 2 reasons for this location. One is that other systems such as Ruby and Python are set up this way. The other is forward compatability. The intention is to create a real Cocoa framework out of this to help with the creation of Erlang ports or other Erlang related software in Objective-C. This is however not the first priority.
ErlangXCode is a plugin enabling the use of XCode as an IDE for Erlang development. It's all early work. Creating the XCode addons would not be possible without the amazing effort of Damien Bobillot who painstakingly found out how the XCode API works and shared it with us. If you install ErlangXCode without the ErlangX runtime install you have to make sure that erlc is available in /usr/local/bin. To see the basics of what I have currently you can check out this screencast(sorry about the watermark).
Now. As I have spent pretty much only 3-4 hours on this and most of it went into finding out how the XCode plugin system works there is a lot of things that need fixing. Syntax highliting is in early stages and a lot is missing. You can help by downloading the source and commiting to me changes or just editing the files installed in /Developer/Library/Xcode/Plug-ins/Erlang.xcplugin and sending me the changes. All help is much appreciated.
You can download the first test here. Although it should work fine be warned that this is an early test and some things may not work as advertised.
Reader Comments (3)
where can I download ErlangX or where can i find the eric app???
ErlangX was way not ready for release. More problems that it was worth.
I'm redoing it and restructuring the idea.
Just follow the manual installation instructions here meanwhile.
I have picked up the excellent plugin work that Jon has done and run with it. There is an Xcode plugin that you can use to build your applications. Go to https://sourceforge.net/projects/quickconnect/ and download the QuickConnectFamily installer. Run it and you will find that there are two Erlang Projects now available to you. The first is a standard erlang app and the other uses the QuickConnectErlang framework.
Both of these run your application within Xcode and all output is directed to the Xcode console. When you are done developing your application it can be run from the commandline like any other application. The plugin even includes a bash script you can use to execute your app.
For more information go to http://tetontech.wordpress.com/2009/08/13/quickconnecterlang-now-available-for-os-x/
I have added auto-complete templates, and made other changes and fixes, for the most commonly used functionality.
I hope this helps.
Keep up the good work Jon.
Lee