Features:

New action for extracting locale information under work

About

Lua Topping

Lua Topping is a NetBeans plugin that adds WoW Addon Project support to your NetBeans IDE. The main goal is to benefit form the tools and aids present in the NetBeans platform to develop World of Warcraft addons. Recognition of wow addon folders as projects, common templates and deployment to wow addon folder are some of the features provided by Lua Topping (see Features for a detailed list). The NetBeans platform provides tools like a powerful editor, integration to version control tools, task monitoring, etc.

Features

Lua Topping was born with the purpose of providing useful features to the WoW addon developer. Next is the list of this features which are offered by the Lua Topping module. Features inherited from the use of the NetBeansIDE are presented later.

  • Addon Deployment: As a good practice I don't develop my addons directly modifying the lua files in the WoW Addon folder. Hence, after coding some changes or tests I had to manually copy the files from my developing folder to the Addon folder which is boring. If you copy the whole folder version control folders get copied too which I personally dislike. Other times I modified a bunch of files and couldn't remember which or the folder structure made me have to navigate a lot to copy the modified sources. Lua Topping addresses this issues by implementing a "Deploy" action. This actions is backed by an Ant script which copies files from your develop folder to your WoW Addon folder. The script ignores version control files and only copies files which are newer than the destination.
  • Common templates: Probably not a big deal, but it is nice to have the "common" skeleton for typical addon files. In the future a new file should take advantage of the NetBeans project information feature to inject license, author and other details.
  • Project Properties: A set of properties are being defined for an Addon Project. Currently only the WoW Addon folder path can be configured. This will tell Lua Topping where to deploy the addon. This allows the author to have different versions of addons that he can test in different versions of WoW, i.e. normal, PTR, beta.
  • NetBeans features: NetBeans is a powerful IDE that provides features many features. Among others the multiple window docking mechanism and the version control integration (with both repository control and in editor indication of changes) are the ones I found more useful. Please refer to the NetBeans site for a complete set of features.

luaSupport

luaSupport is a child project, focused on providing support for writing code using the lua language, within the NetBeans IDE. luaSupport was developed to provide syntax highlighting and grammar error detection. As the project continues to evolve new features as cold folding, code completion, code hints, etc., are being implemented.