Project Builder Python Support

Contents

• Installation
• Documentation
• To Do

Triple-quoted strings are not always treated correctly by Project Builder. This seems to be a Project Builder bug.

Installation

Create the directory 'Specifications' within ~/Developer/ProjectBuilder Extras/ or /Developer/ProjectBuilder Extras/:

mkdir -p ~/Developer/ProjectBuilder\ Extras/Specifications/

Copy the specification files into that directory:

cp Python.pb*spec ~/Developer/ProjectBuilder\ Extras/Specifications/

The binary installer will install the specifications for you.

Documentation

The version of Project Builder that ships with the December Developer Tools modularizes the support for file types and syntax based colorizing of source files. The base mechanisms and definitions are found in:

file:///System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/PBXCore.framework/Resources/

Not surprisingly, Apple has provided a mechanism for augmenting and overriding the configuration information found within the PBXCore framework. By creating a 'Specifications' directory within any of the ProjectBuilder Extras directories (/Developer/ProjectBuilder Extras and ~/Developer/ProjectBuilder Extras being the two most common).

All of the various specification files are simply property lists. The file names do not appear to be significant beyond the extension. That is, Python.pblangspec could have been called Foo.pblangspec and it would still work as expected.

The contents of the two files were determined largely by looking through the files found in the PBXCore framework. The list of keywords for python was generated by python itself:

In [1]: import keyword            
In [2]: keyword.kwlist
Out[2]: 
['and',
 'assert',
 'break',
 'class',
 'continue',
 'def',
 'del',
 'elif',
 'else',
 'except',
 'exec',
 'finally',
 'for',
 'from',
 'global',
 'if',
 'import',
 'in',
 'is',
 'lambda',
 'not',
 'or',
 'pass',
 'print',
 'raise',
 'return',
 'try',
 'while',
 'yield']

To Do

• NOTE: PyObjC's Project Builder support is unmaintained. It is unlikely that any of these items will ever be completed.
• There are a number of other specification files found within the PBXCore. Of particular relevance to Python would be the Compiler Specifications. It would be extremely handy to be able to check syntax and compile Python code from within PBX directly. This appears to be a matter of both specifying how the compiler should be invoked and providing a set of regular expressions for parsing the output.
• Instead of invoking Python directly, a compiler specification that used PyChecker would provide both syntactical checker and higher level script integrity tests.
• Expanding the language definition to include a list of alternative keywords would provide for highlighting many common Python constructs and modules, as well.
• Looking at the internals to PBXCore, support for context-clicking (i.e. cmd- and opt- double-clicking on keywords found in Python source) could be supported if one were to build a custom Python Parser/Lexer as a PBX plugin.
• Support for Jython. On the syntax front, this would be a matter of duplicating a number of the keyword bits from the Java configuration. On the compiler front, support would focus on feeding through to the mechanism that turns Python source into .class files. All of this assumes that Python and Jython source can (and should?) be differentiated.