Lua Development Tools Koneki, IDE based on Eclipse

Just got a comment from developers of Lua IDE Koneki on my previous post about setting up Eclipse-based Lua IDE. So, I gave it a try and it is quite neat, I really hope the developers can keep it moving and make it a great default IDE for Lua developers ;-) As of now, I feel it is not yet conveniently as useful as LuaEclipse I posted about a while back. But the project is under active development and it will become better every day, I am sure.

Here is a quick rundown what I have tried so far:

1. Installation: they offer both standalone and update site, I just installed through update site following their instructions. I am on Eclipse 3.7.1, btw. I also got lua and luarocks installed through Homebrew (by default they are installed in /usr/local/bin).

2. Create a new Lua project: create a new Lua project, add source files under src, similar to the typical Java projects.

3. Ready to run? I feel stuck at this step at first since there is no launch configuration that allows me to configure the local Lua environment. After running through several threads, it seems Koneki does not support launch configuration yet. It only supports "remote debug launch configuration".

But the developer also provides this workaround using "External Tools" and I got it to run and show the results in Console View. This is the sample configuration (you need to select the main.lua before run this external tool configuration). For the meaning of Eclipse variables like ${workspace_loc}, ${resource_loc}, see Eclipse external tools documentation.

4. Debugging. LDT supports remote debugging via DBGP, you can follow the LDT user guide to set it up.

Many thanks to the LDT developers for this nice IDE. I wish the launch configuration can be added so beginners like me can get started with Lua and LDT quickly. Also, I wish the configuration of debugging and remote debugging can be integrated into LDT.

Unbounded function wrappers

I was reading "JavaScript Garden" (highly recommend for JS beginner/intermediate) and could not understand the concept of the "fast, unbound wrappers" for functions. See Function arguments for the example.

function Foo() {}

Foo.prototype.method = function(a, b, c) {
    console.log(this, a, b, c);
};

// Create an unbound version of "method" 
// It takes the parameters: this, arg1, arg2...argN
Foo.method = function() {

    // Result: Foo.prototype.method.call(this, arg1, arg2... argN)
    Function.call.apply(Foo.prototype.method, arguments);
};

Luckily I found this Stackoverflow post that explains the idea behind it. It took me a while to wrap my head around Function.call.apply ;-)

So, the basic idea is that we have a function defined in a class, but we want to use it without binding to specific object, maybe the concept of static method in Java? So, instead of creating an object and invoke the function on the object, we define the function as a property of the class, not on its prototype.