In which way is Emacs-Eclim limited to Java support?

[ReneFroger]

Thanks for this plugin, I appreciate it. On the page of emacs-eclim repository, there is a notification that emacs-eclim is limited to mostly java support at this time.

But I don't understand this. For example, I have Eclipse with PHP support. I open a PHP file in Eclipse, and then the code completion is working fine, in Eclipse and in Vim.

But I couldn't get the idea that Eclim for Emacs is limited to Java. It doesn't fiddle with the input that Eclipse delivers to Emacs, if I'm not mistaken. If so, then you could get the same completion suggestion in Emacs like you have in Eclipse, right?

Please enlighten me.

Thanks in advance.

[codecoll]

The eclim daemon provides various operations and not all of them are implemented by the emacs client.

Here are the PHP operations provided by the eclim daemon: http://eclim.org/vim/php/index.html

I don't know which of these are implemented in emacs-eclim, but implementing them is not hard, only someone has to do it.

[fred-o]

The reason emacs-eclim is mainly geared towards java development is that that was what I (and @senny ) was doing at the time. Since I worked with java at my day job I had a pretty good idea about how completion should work, etc. But I don't know enough Python, PHP or Ruby to know what makes a good work environment.

The emacs client does a lot of things under the hood to make things work smoothly. For example, completion candidates aren't just inserted as-is, but run through a custom parser and turned into a yasnippet for easy completion. You'd have to reimplement that part for every language you'd want to support.

[kostajh]

@fred-o would it be possible for you to outline what exactly would need to be done for PHP support to get implemented? I would be interested to work on it.

[kleewho]

@kostajh I'm in the same situation as @fred-o is. I don't know php enough and don't use it so I can't say anything valuable. eclim itself have only 3 commands to call and in general emacs-eclim have two of those implemented. From what I see php_search is not mentioned anywhere but maybe it's not needed and projectile with grep or ack or ag or whatever is enough. In general just use this thing and check for yourself where are your pain points and just scratch the itch until you're happy.