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NCL Eclipse

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NCL Eclipse is an authoring tool for Nested Context Language. It aims to aid textual authoring of NCL documents. NCL is the declarative standard language for ISDB-Tb (International System for Digital Broadcast Terrestrial Brazilian) and also is ITU-T standard for IPTV systems.

NCL Eclipse was developed as a plug-in to Eclipse IDE in order to be easily integrated with others plug-ins, for others ISDB-Tb and ITU-T standard languages (such as Lua and Java). It is open source, and currently it is maintained by Laws Lab! Its source code is available at Brazilian Public Software Portal under GNU GPLv2 license.

NCL Eclipse Historical Evolution

NCL Eclipse 1.0

The first stable 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 stable version of NCL Eclipse, named "NCL Eclipse 1.4", brings program visualization, media previews and hypertext navigation, some improvements 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 stable, and current version, is "NCL Eclipse 1.5". This version contains some improvements in source code. As new feature, this version came with support to semi-automatic error correction and option to run the NCL document, provided by a virtual machine running the Ginga-NCL emulator.

Installation

The minimum requirement to install and use NCL Eclipse are:

  • Java Virtual Machine 1.6 or higher,
  • and Eclipse 3.5 or higher.

Eclipse plug-ins installation can be performed following a manual or an automatic approach. The detailed instructions how to install NCL Eclipse are available in Install Section at NCL Eclipse official Web Site. In the remainder of this section we show the main steps in the manual and automatic installation of NCL Eclipse.

Manual Installation

To perform this procedure, it is enough to unzip the zip package available at NCL Eclipse official web site (http://laws.deinf.ufma.br/ncleclipse) inside the Eclipse plugin directory.

Automatic Installation

The best way to install NCL is following the automatic approach:

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

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

3 - Click on "Next" until the license agreement is presented. Read the license, and if you agree with it, click on "Finish" button. Now, Eclipse will install the NCL Eclipse for you.

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, it 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.

Running an NCL Document

This feature is only available in the 1.5 version. Before executing the document, it 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.


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