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 I like Scala, and I am excited about it. But for some reason, every time I try to use it I encounter some minor annoying issue that sort of turns me off and prevents me from making more use of it. Not something significant mind you (type system, performance) but rather something simply annoying.

This time: I just read about improvements to the Eclipse IDE which would make it easy to create mixed Java/Scala projects, which would be great for Plural. So I downloaded it, installed it, and what do you know, I can't even create an object without a syntax error! This is definitely a bug, since I created an object using the wizards, but when I do it I get a syntax error, "Syntax Error: Delete these tokens" on my object declaration. This bug has been reported, but not fixed, and makes the plugin entirely unusable for me. Boo!

This is going to be a rather technical post. Sorry, but I couldn't find information about this anywhere online, or at least I was misunderstanding what information was available online. What I am going to try to explain is something that I just figured out. Let's say you are creating an Eclipse plugin, and part of the functionality provided by your plugin is some classes that will be usable by other programmers who are using your plugin. How can you make it so that the update site for your plugin includes the source code for your plugin, so that users can hover over class names, see the Java docs, etc.?

( Click here for the gory, gory details. )