Lately my day to day work included developing applications with the Play! framework. Play!, in both its 1.x and 2.x versions, is a great framework but its integration with Eclipse is not always easy. One of the most frequent irritant I had, was having to use of dreaded play eclipsify command which helpfully states:

$ play eclipsify
~        _            _ 
~  _ __ | | __ _ _  _| |
~ | '_ \| |/ _' | || |_|
~ |  __/|_|\____|\__ (_)
~ |_|            |__/   
~
~ play! 1.2.5, http://www.playframework.org
~
~ OK, the application is ready for eclipse
~ Use File/Import/General/Existing project to import /Users/dom/Sources/play-ground into eclipse
~
~ Use eclipsify again when you want to update eclipse configuration files.
~ However, it's often better to delete and re-import the project into your workspace since eclipse keeps dirty caches...
~

The key phrase being «…it’s often better to delete and re-import the project into your workspace since eclipse keeps dirty caches…». Unfortunately, it is better to heed this piece of advise. However, if you work with several external libraries whose version numbers change on a frequent basis, it can quickly become quite annoying to do all this mouse work. Especially, if you trained yourself for years to do most of your tasks by using the keyboard or some sort of automation.

This is where Eclim can help! Eclim is an integration layer between Eclipse and VIM. You can both use vim inside Eclipse or use some cherry-picked features of Eclipse from VIM. I’m not yet at the point where I would use VIM to develop Java applications, if ever, and I’m not suggesting you to switch from Eclipse to VIM either. However, the API used by the VIM plugin to communicate with it’s Eclipse counterpart is a handy entry point into Eclipse automation.

After some digging around I found out that Eclim comes with an eclim command which, in turn, accepts commands to be sent to Eclipse running an eclimd server. I will not enter here into the details of how Eclim works but it was quite easy to put together this simple script:

play eclipsify && \
  ${ECLIPSE_HOME}/eclim -command project_delete -p "$(basename $(pwd))" && \
  ${ECLIPSE_HOME}/eclim -command project_import -f "$(pwd)"

The script basically executes eclipsify then deletes the project whose name is the name of the current directory and then reimports the project from the current directory. The ECLIPSE_HOME variable should contain the location of your Eclipse enhanced with Eclim.

Installing Eclim is a breeze if you follow those steps.

Have fun automating your Eclipse work!