NCL Eclipse

NCL Eclipse is an authoring tool for Nested Context Language. NCL Eclipse was developed as a plug-in to Eclipse IDE. The NCL Eclipse main purpose is to facilitate the textual authoring of NCL document. NCL is the standard declarative language for ISDB-Tb (International System for Digital Broadcast Terrestrial Brazilian) and also is ITU-T standard for IPTV systems.

Installation

The minimum requirement to install and use the NCL Eclipse is to have the Eclipse 3.5 or higher. There are 2 ways to install: manual and automatic. The manual way is not recommended, because can generates some error or doesn't work very well. To perform this procedure, is enough unzip the zip available in official site (http://laws.deinf.ufma.br/ncleclipse) in plugin directory of Eclipse directory. The better way is following these steps:

1 - Open the menu "Help->Install New Software", or (depending of version) "Help->Software Updates".

2 - Click on "Add" button and add the follow repository: http://laws.deinf.ufma.br/ncleclipse/update.

3 - Click on "Next" until show the license. Read the license and, case agree with it, click on "Finish" and the Eclipse will install the NCL Eclipse.

Creating a New NCL Project

To create a new NCL Project is a very easy task. To do it, just open the menu "File->New->Project". From 1.5 version the option "NCL Project" is available. To lower versions, is necessary create a "General" project. Once created the project, to include NCL documents is also to easy. Just open the menu "File->New->Other" and choose the option "NCL Document". Both to create project and include NCL documents, there are some wizards to help these task.

Executing the NCL Document

This feature is only available in the 1.5 version. Before execute the document, is necessary to configure the environment. Go to menu "Window->Preferences" and in the left pane choose the option "NCL->Remote Ginga-NCL Play". Probably you have to change just one field: "hostname". In this field you have to put the IP Address of the virtual machining that are running the Ginga-NCL.

Historic

NCL Eclipse 1.0

The first version of NCL Eclipse was named "NCL Eclipse 1.0". This version included support to syntax highlighting, folding (which allows the author to hide parts of source code according with his needs), wizards to create simple documents, auto-formatting, document marking error validation, contextual content suggestion and an outline view (which give to authors the document view as a tree). To provide the marking error validation, all NCL Eclipse versions uses the NCL Validator (validation framework of NCL documents). This first version was very well accepted by the community of NCL developers, which gave several feedbacks. The NCL Eclipse evolution is strongly based on these feedbacks.

NCL Eclipse 1.4

The second version of NCL Eclipse came using the name "NCL Eclipse 1.4". Program visualization, media previews and hypertext navigation were some improves in comparison with version 1.0. Additionally, a new plug-in aimed to integrate NCL Eclipse with NCL Club was included in the same package. As pointed out before, the integration with NCL Club allows for beginners to start learning NCL based on real-world examples. The internationalization support for English, Spanish and Portuguese was also included in this version.

NCL Eclipse 1.5

The last and current version is "NCL Eclipse 1.5". This version contain some improvements in source code. As new feature, this version came with support to semi-automatic error correction and option to execute the document, provided there one machine executing the Ginga-NCL emulator.

External links

• NCL Eclipse Official Website