3. 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...
7. 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
8. 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.
9. 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)
33. 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.
34. 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.
35. 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