For my MSc project I made heavy use of the Eclipse IDE to write various Groovy programs that took an XML input and output an SVG (of course SVG is XML also, but I hope you understand).
Groovy was a great choice as, while not as fast as C, for instance, it was easy to write something that could hack XML and SVG – all I had to worry about was the algorithm as much of the infrastructure for handling the file formats was to hand.
And Eclipse made perfect sense as the IDE as it had good Groovy support.
But my problem was I am a VIM user most of the time and so there was more than one time when I had to go back and clean up the :w mess I had left behind.
Now, it seems, there may be a solution to hand – eclim – which allows me to use VIM in Eclipse and vice versa. I will try it in the next few days and see how I get on.
Related articles
- Eclim – bringing Eclipse functionality to the Vim editor (eclim.org)
- Introducing the lackeyml format (cartesianproduct.wordpress.com)
- Using XSLT to manipulate an SVG file (cartesianproduct.wordpress.com)
- SVG, JavaScript and the DOM (i-programmer.info)
- Editing Labels in QGIS SVG Output using Inkscape (underdark.wordpress.com)
- R 2.14 for Windows: now with SVG support (r-bloggers.com)
- Playing with SVG Design (webdesignerwall.com)
seems like a pretty good idea to me and I have used it recently to generate graphics to represent the processes running on a Linux box.