EPIC Perl Coding YAPC::NA 2007 Houston, TX Josh McAdams

Quick Audience Poll How do you edit your Perl code?

Sweeping Generalizations Ask just about any Perl programmer what he or she uses to edit Perl and you'll get any one of a hand-full of typical answers: - vi (the editor of the beast vi vi vi) - emacs (rms didn't get rms for no reason) - BBEdit - some random windows text editor - Notepad - UltraEdit basically, it all boils down to...

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Text Editors Most of these environments are extremely powerful and can get the job done, but they have a problem... ... they can be intimidating

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IDEs Yes, most Perl programmers imagine the worst, but a decent IDE really isn't bad to have in your toolkit. There are a few IDEs out there: - The Open Perl IDE - Komodo - Enginsit's Perl Editor - Affrus - Eclipse

Eclipse Eclipse isn't just a Java IDE, it's actually a pluggable application framework... And one of those plugins happens to be EPIC, an Eclipse plugin for Perl integration.

EPIC What is EPIC? - an Eclipse plugin that customizes the IDE for Perl development What does it do for me? - syntax highlighting - edit-time syntax checking - code assistants - quick references to perldoc - outline of used modules and subroutines - in-editor source formatting (perltidy) - HTML export - code templates - RegExp plugin - Perl debugger integration (even for web development)

EPIC – The IDE

EPIC – Syntax Highlighting

EPIC – Syntax Checking

EPIC – Code Assistant

EPIC - Perldoc

EPIC – Perldoc Search

EPIC - Outlines

EPIC – Perl Tidy

EPIC – HTML Export

EPIC – HTML Export

EPIC – Code Templates

EPIC - RegExp

EPIC - RegExp

EPIC - Debugging

EPIC – Code Folding

EPIC – Toggle Comments

EPIC – Toggle Comments

EPIC – Refactor

EPIC – Refactor

EPIC – Refactor

EPIC – Refactor

EPIC – Refactor

EPIC – Refactor

Understanding Eclipse - Eclipse thinks in workspaces, projects, views, and perspectives - A workspace is just a location of your code on the disk - A project is a group of files that logically fit together, sort of like a Perl distribution - A view is just a window in the interface that provides some sort of functionality... an editor, and outline, etc. - A perspective is a grouping of views that help you effectively do the task at hand... debugging, code editing, etc.

When To Use Epic - Epic thinks in projects, it is part of a Java IDE, it can be slow to load and a little overkill for smaller projects. - Epic/Eclipse is really good at helping you manage large projects with multiple files and other resources. - Eclipse can be integrated with SVN, database browsers, and many other tools that can consolidate all of your project tools into one interface.

Resources Eclipse http://www.eclipse.org/ EPIC http://e-p-i-c.sourceforge.net/ Build Perl applications with Eclipse http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/edu/os-dw-os-perlecl-i.html How to debug Perl apps with Eclipse http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/edu/os-dw-os-perlecl-i.html