ESLink - Eclipse Plug-ins for SAS development

This project is about a collection of plug-ins for the Eclipse platform. These plug-ins are grouped together under the name ESLink and they provide a partly integration of the SAS® system (see www.sas.com) into the Eclipse environment.

News and Status

April 01, 2011 - 0.8.2 release.
Use update site: <http://www.anaxima.com/eslink-updatesite>
- This is not a joke ;-)
- Bug fix #49.
- Preview version of Eslink-Navigator using CNF.
February 15, 2011 - 0.8.1 release.
- Bug fix #36 - Error when there are closed projects in the workspace.
- Updatesite works with Eclipse 3.5 now.
February 02, 2011 - 0.8.0 release.
New features are:
- improved SAS base code editor including folding and outline support
- ANT deployment for Eslink launches
- Eslink Development perspective
- bug fixes
January 28, 2010 - 0.7.1 release.
New features are:
- support for bold, italics etc. in SAS editor
- first working SAS base code parser
- folding support in SAS editor for macros, data and proc steps
- outline view for SAS editor
December 2, 2009 - New 0.6.3 release.
And a new update site: <http://www.anaxima.com/eslink-updatesite>
March 6, 2009 - First alpha release.
Feb 27, 2009 - Sourceforge project created

Features

Connection to local or remote SAS session
View SAS libraries and catalogs
Editor with SAS syntax highlighting, templates and outline
Submitting of SAS programs code snippets
Receive log and list output in Eclipse console window
Synchronize project content with remote SAS machine
Basic support for opening SAS tables (read-only)

Installation

If you do not want to build Eslink yourself you may use the Eclipse update manager (Help -> Install New Software...). Add the updatesite <http://www.anaxima.com/eslink-updatesite> and you should be able to install Eslink from there.

Documentation

Documentation is still very basic (not that you expected anything else, do you?). Some usage hints can be found here: https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/eslink/wiki/UserDocs.

Development

This project uses Trac as development wiki and ticketing system. See http://apps.sourceforge.net/trac/eslink/wiki.

The Eslink Sourceforge site is located at http://sourceforge.net/projects/eslink/.

History

Development of these plug-ins was started because the developer (see below) was thrown into the job of maintaining a fairly big SAS SCL application. Coming from a strong Java background I was not really satisfied with the tools available for source code manipulation, refactoring and general development. Since we wanted to maintain the SCL Code in Subversion the need of having the SCL code outside of the SAS IDE arose. This triggered first experiments. In addition to that this project is an experiment on how easy or difficult it is to integrate a somewhat alien system into Eclipse.

In 2009 a Sourceforge project was created to support any further development.

Developers

Thomas Vater, www.anaxima.com

Disclaimer

Currently all of this is coffee-break programming - literally. So consider it alpha software and do not expect too much from it. It might work for you but it might as well break totally and destroy your work. Be careful!