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Turbo charged Erlang development!

Erlang is a open-sourced concurrency-oriented programming language, developed by Ericsson. It has proven itself in many industrial applications as a powerful tool. Now we are building a development environment that will boost programmer efficiency even more.

Overview

The latest version is 0.3.45 and offers the following features:

The IDE is functional even if I still consider the status alpha. Some features are functional in the normal case, but might not handle errors very well. There are also debug printouts and messages here and there.

[*] If installed in the system in the standard place. Some versions of the documentation are known to produce erroneous printouts, but we're working on that. Also only tested on Windows and a Ubuntu Linux.

Installation

To use ErlIDE you need the freeware IDE Eclipse, version 3.3 or later. You can download Eclipse from eclipse.org/downloads, the version called "Eclipse IDE for Java Developers" is the smallest download there, but any of the versions listed can be used.

An Erlang runtime also has to be installed, go to http://www.erlang.org/download.html, we recommend the version R11B-5, but any later version can be used. If you are running on Windows, just install the version downloaded, in other cases you will have to build an Erlang OTP first, please refer to the Erlang README.

The ErlIDE plug-in for Eclipse is available through an update site: start Eclipse and select "Help/Software Updates/Find and Install..." from the menu. Click "Search for new features to install" and "Next>" and then "New remote site". The name of the site should be "ErlIDE" and the URL is "http://erlide.sourceforge.net/update", if you proceed, Eclipse will download and install the ErlIDE plug-in.

When Eclipse is restarted, you will be prompted to point out where ErlIDE can find the Erlang installation. On a Unix/Linux/Mac system this is typically /usr/local/lib/erlang, on windows it is C:\\Program Files\\erl5.5.5. (With other numbers for other releases.)

FAQ

How do I get started?

First, you have to install Erlang. Look for your platform at the Erlang download site and follow the instructions.

Then in Eclipse, choose Help->Software Updates->Find and install...->New features and create a new remote update site, pointing it at http://erlide.sourceforge.net/update . Follow then the normal installation procedures.

When restarting Eclipse, you will have to configure the plugin by pointing to the place you installed Erlang, and that should be all: now you can explore and send bug reports!

"Small" releases (x.x.N) will mostly be available only from the update site, not as an archive download.

When I press a key, it takes one second to see the result in the editor!?!?

Make sure you create a project and open an Erlang file inside it. The above happens when opening a file with File->Open file....

Can I help?

Sure! All help is welcome, because there's plenty to do.

Register as a developer by contacting me (Vlad), or develop by yourself some cool feature and submit it later. If the feature is something you'd expect in any decent IDE, please check first if it isn't already under development.

What is your timeplan?

The nearest milestone is in April 2008, when we expect to have basic debugging support and decent indentation and code formatting.

Later in 2008, we plan to support Refactoring, EDoc documenation, and structured search in Erlang code.

Why isn't Emacs (or vim) good enough?

They are good, no doubt about it! However, a graphical UI (as opposed to a text UI) offers much more potential for useful features, especially since Eclipse is such a nice platform. Just to mention one: an integrated debugger.

Much of the functionality we are developing will be possible to use from Emacs too, since it is implemented in Erlang. If you feel that text UI is your thing, please go ahead and implement an Emacs frontend!

There are some recent enhancements to Emacs and vim modes, but I dare to say that when we'll be ready, we're going to offer better functionality, because Erlide talks to Erlang directly and can use all its libraries.
For example, please compare the Emacs syntax highlighting with the Erlide one, when you enter Ch = $" in the middle of a module and you'll remember what I mean.

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