New website for the upcoming Wolfram Language Plugin 2019
For those of you who did not follow the development of the Wolfram Language Plugin carefully, it’s been a long time since you’ve heard substantial news. The latest version 2.4.4 was published in 2017 almost 2 years ago, and only a handful of people, who visited the Gitter Chatroom regularly were aware of all the things that happened in the meantime. This is a quick overview of the current state of the Wolfram Language Plugin.
The most obvious change is that the plugin got renamed to Wolfram Language Plugin to match the name of Mathematica’s programming language which was re-branded some years ago. Additionally, the plugin got a new logo which will from now on be used consistently throughout the IDE
However, these are by far the smallest changes and a lot of the improvements happened on the inside. For the past 2 years, a lot of the core functionality of the plugin was re-structured and re-implemented. This change was necessary to allow for the development of current features which rely much more on the internal representation of your code. That being said, the new version of the Wolfram Language plugin will contain features such as cross-file completion, attaching packages to your project for enhanced code-insight, and much more. Once the release is finalized, I will document all essential changes in detail so that you can get the best coding experience.
As you see right now, I also built a new website which can be edited easily and allows me to write markdown. Instead of using Joomla, this website is built with the static site generator Jekyll and the plan is to have all crucial resources like documentation and a news-blog in one place.
The Wolfram Language Plugin 2019 will be one of the first plugins published through the upcoming JetBrains Marketplace. The marketplace allows 3rd party developers like me to license their plugin directly through the usual plugin repository and receive subscription fees for certain license types. I have chosen a very light-weight plan for the prizes which only charges people who are working on private projects or people who use the plugin in their business. Like IntelliJ IDEA itself, the Wolfram Language Plugin will still be free of charge for open-source developers, educators or students and there is a long list of special offers for all kinds of situations. If you look at the table of special offers, you’ll find that there are a lot of opportunities to get the plugin free of charge. I hope that enough people choose to subscribe to a private license so that the revenue helps to pay the bills and I’m able to work more officially on the Wolfram Language Plugin.
In the next weeks, the goal is to publish the new version of the Wolfram Language Plugin and to make it available to everyone. There are still some bumps along the road, but I’m working on it.