From the Sage MAS Team

[#1]

Not many MAS 90/200 developers, outside the MAS 90/200 R&D team, know that Providex has created a PVX plug-in for the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE).

Eclipse originated with IBM - Canada in November of 2001 and a consortium of software vendors as a replacement for existing SmallTalk/VisualAge family of IDE products. The Eclipse Foundation, a non-profit entity created to promote open-source Eclipse projects and cultivate the open-source Eclipse community, was founded in January of 2004.

In addition to supporting Providex software development, the eclipse plug-in provides many of the tools and utilities found in the older generation Providex development tools. These tools and enhanced utilities include:

• Dictionary Viewer – shows information about files defined within the selected Providex data dictionary
• PVX Docs – Automatically creates class documentation from the source code
• Message Library Viewer – shows defined messages within the selected Providex message library
• Style Check – tool for defining simple rules to describe a coding standard. The rules will be automatically applied to written code when the Style Check utility is run
• Super Search – performs text searches of the files in an Eclipse work space
• Application Server – provides access to the graphical ProvideX Application Server configuration
• Web Server– provides access to the graphical ProvideX Web Server configuration
• Convert ProvideX keyed files – converts ProvideX keyed files to/from XML using the embedded data dictionary
• Creat Data File/Library Outline – rebuilds the outline information for all resources selected in the navigation view

 

Eclipse also provides a variety of other enhancements and benefits over the legacy ProvideX development tools. Eclipse is an application framework, meaning Eclipse can also be modified programmatically to run web based applications. The ProvideX team has also produced a client application based on the Eclipse RCP framework called UltraFX. For more information on UltraFX, check out:

 

http://www.pvx.com/products/#prod-ultrafx

.

The ProvideX plug-in can be extended/enhanced using the ProvideX programming language and Eclipse is also an open development platform. In the same manner the PVX plug-in was created, Eclipse can be further extended with additional tools, utilities, and functionality. In fact, Sage encourages the partner community to develop new contributed tools and utilities to Eclipse for ProvideX application development.

 

Finally, the Eclipse plug-in for ProvideX can be downloaded from the ProvideX website at:

 

http://www.pvx.com/downloads/browse.pvs?wid=download-eclipse-plugin

 

Join the Sage MAS 90/200 development team and give Eclipse and the ProvideX plug-in a try.

 

Scot Larsen

Director, R&D

MAS 90/200

 Special thanks to Jarrett Smith for his contribution to this entry.