A taste of livecoding in your Eclipse IDE.

When I saw Bret Victors impressive talk Inventing on Principle I started to research the livecoding topic. One of the things I came up with is the Vortex JavaScript Editor. Its a Eclipse editor plugin that holds a WebSocket connection to your browser and evalutates changed code on key press. This shortens the feedback loop and can speed up some JavaScript tasks.

The editor plugin is build ontop of the JavaScript editor from the Eclipse Web Tools Platform. The WebSocket server is featured by Jetty.





I created a screencast to show the Vortex editor in action.

The editor plugin currently works with Eclipse Juno versions and requires the plugin “JavaScript Development Tools” version 1.4.1 to be installed.

The editor plugin and the JavaScript connector are available under the MIT license.

More information will follow on the project page.