Querying from Eclipse

As an alternative to the Smalltalk IDE for interacting with SOUL, we have developed a set of Eclipse plugins for interacting with SOUL called Barista.  To use these plugins, SOUL must have started a headfull Eclipse in the previous steps (either from within the Smalltalk environment or from the command line).

Barista is not (yet) meant as a replacement to the Smalltalk-based SOUL front-end, but rather as a way to easily implement tools that rely on SOUL. For this, Barista provides:

  • A SOUL Query editor with syntax highlighting, auto-completion, syntax error checking and clause definition help.
  • A Query Result view that shows the results of a query, allows navigation to each of the bindings for variables that resolve to Java AST nodes, and facilities to mark the results of a query in the JDT Editor windows.
  • An extension mechanism that permits Eclipse plugin developers to access SOUL, run queries, and manipulate their results.

In what follows, we describe how to interact with SOUL through the Barista. The following sections assume that you have been able to install SOUL, its libraries and the Barista set of Eclipse plugins.