Wolfram Workbench is now compatible with Wolfram Language and Mathematica 10 and 11

http://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/963774

I agree 100%. I have waited far too long for Workbench 3 to be released. It would be quite useful to have a product that worked to create and maintain documentation, as you outline.

There must be an internal version of Workbench that works with 10.x (and probably 11.x) so it can't be that hard to make a stand-alone version for the rest of us.

I've been writing documented Mathematica Applications for a number of years and so applied to Wolfram support to obtain a copy of Workbench 3. It appears that you also have to obtain a couple extra DLL files with it, at least on WIndows. Anyway they sent me a copy and I believe they have distributed it to some other people. So, if you are in serious need you might apply to them. They don't seem to have a regular beta testing program.

I use Workbench only for documentation and don't care much about its debugging and other features. My experience is that it's working fine for documentation with Mathematica 10.1. I did have to remember to set the path within Workbench to the new Mathematica version.

I find that a convenient way to work is to keep only the documentation within Workbench and leave the package files, style sheets and palettes in the deployed application. It's an advantage not to have these files in two places because if you update them in the deployed Application you would have to remember to also update them in Workbench. I can also do some debugging from within Workbench just by updating the deployed code files.

Massimo Workbench2 doesn't work with 10.0, 10.0.1 and 10.0.2. Why would you expect different results with 10.1?

If I am thinking about this correctly, the Eclipse editor uses a configuration file or file(s) that can be configured with an ini or xml file. The details needed by Eclipse for a given language to support auto-completion and syntax coloring were defined in these configuration files. I was wondering if configuration files that included syntax for Mathematica 9, 10 and 10.1 were available. This would not enable debugging - but would still be useful.

In the absence of Workbench is there a straight-forward way to profile code?

I agree. I wasted a lot of time today developing a program using version 10. I had to quit and restart Mathematica numerous times.

Since the WL-Plugin was again mentioned several times, let me take the opportunity to say a few words.

The WL-Plugin is the Mathematica Plugin for IntelliJ IDEA and you can find the first announcement on stackexchange here, the initial post in the community here, a detailed description of new features here and the source-code here. As already pointed out the WL-Plugin does indeed support all of the syntax additions that were introduced with the release of Mathematica version 10.0. Prominent examples are the Association brackets <|…|> or for instance RightComposition operator /*.

If you are new to the WL-Plugin or even if you have used it for a while, I strongly encourage you to read the article How to use IDEA effectively with Mathematica code that I published some weeks ago. I know that all the features of IDEA can be a bit overwhelming at first, especially for users that just want to start right away, but the IDE is so powerful that you should invest a small amount of time to get to know the most important things.

Last night I added autocompletion and the documentation-lookup for all new built-in functions in version 10. Furthermore, I added the new file-extensions *.wl and *.wlt so that they are recognised by the WL-Plugin. Together with some minor bug-fixes this will be released in the next week and everyone should get the update-notice automatically through IDEA.

Furthermore, let me respond to this

I hope that the debugger will be implemented soon

I know that there are 4 major things missing in the WL-Plugin: Debugging, Profiling, Documentation-Building and Unit-Testing. What you have to understand is that e.g. the Documentation-Building functionality is part of the WB and not openly accessible through Mathematica. I cannot just use what the WB provides and publish it in an open-source project. A few users might have noticed that the documentation files that come with the WL-Plugin have a different license. I am very grateful that WRI allowed me to use this information but as well as everything that comes with WB, this is property of WRI and I cannot simply copy it into the plugin by re-engineering.

Debugging and Profiling are probably a bit different because this functionality is available in Mathematica too and what I would have to do is to implement a working interface for it: Setting breakpoints in IDEA, controlling execution, etc.. One big hindrance here is that I rarely (in other words never) use these features myself and I’m not very much experienced with it. Therefore, it would need some time so that I can look at these things.

Unit-Testing is now, in version 10, available in Mathematica too, where in former times it was hidden in WB as secret package and was loaded on demand. Now, it is theoretically easily possible to support this in the WL-Plugin.

I'm willing to pay for help to the programmer in order to speed development!

Currently, the limiting factor is time. I’m doing this completely in my free-time and the WL-Plugin is only one of my hobbies. What is interesting and important to me is: how large is the user-base of the WL-Plugin? As you can surely imagine, it makes a difference whether your software is used by 3 or by 300 people, especially when you have to decide what you do with your time.

So what you as users can do is

• Subscribe to the mailing list so that I (and only I) can see how many active users we have. Additionally, I have a way to keep you informed.
• Report bugs or make feature requests in the issue tracker. Look for instance at this issue. I doesn’t always has to be a strict bug-report. Here I see how people are using the plugin an what they want.
• Tell your friends and colleagues about the WL-Plugin! Just spread it to all people you think could be interested.
• Make sure that I know about things the happen around the plugin. For instance, I only saw this question because someone else pointed me to it.

If you need to get in touch with, now you know who this “programmer” is. It is this guy in the Wolfram Community and this guy at stack exchange.

What's Wlplugin? It's really irritating that the problems of Workbench 2.0 with Mathematica 10 have not been addressed. I waste a lot of time having to close and restart Mathematica ever time I want to test out a change in a package.

@Frank - In spite of the lack of comms I know WRI are working on this - as mentioned I have seen a beta of WB3 running on a WRI consultants laptop.

Agree it would be helpful to get a release date from them.

Extrapolating from the 1 example noted above I have seen - the WB3 beta.

I have just installed WorkBench 2 and was having a play and have the same issues with support for v10 syntax etc. I have packages full of associations which it doesn't like, but will run in MMA 10.0.1 and 10.0.2

The good news is the packages were developed by a WRI consultant who was actively using a beta of the next version of Workbench - so at least we know its under development.....

There are alternatives to Workbench. The simplest one is a plain text editor such as Vim or Sublime Text. Both of these provide syntax highlighting, so they make it easier to work with package files (which are plain text files).

And there's the actively developed Mathematica plugin for IntelliJ IDEA: http://wlplugin.halirutan.de/ It provides excellent syntax highlighting (better than any text editor would be capable of since this tool can actually parse Mathematica code), a structure view for easy navigation, templates, auto-completion, documentation tooltips, and other advanced editing features.

What it does not provide at the moment is: built-in debugger, profiler or unit tests.

Hi Tim,

unfortunately this is not implemented yet. To make the Run button work, I have to implement a stable way of opening and managing a Mathematica connection from within IDEA for all 3 big operation systems. While this looks like it can be done in reasonable time, it will definitely require a thoughtful plan from the start, because I want to use this later for Unit Tests too.

Currently, I'm working (and I'm almost finished) on making a polished version of a Structure View, I have finished and I'm now testing Live Templates, Surround With and, very new, an Automatic Bugreporter and I started the framework for Code Inspections.

Although the Run button does not work, you can still test your packages easily. The full path of your package folder can be brought into Mathematica by dragging it from the IDEA project view into the notebook. Then, you add this to the $Path variable with

AppendTo[$Path, "/your/project/folder"]

and after this you can load your packages as usual using << or Get.

Finally, the version of the IDEA plugin which is downloaded automatically is not the latest hot stuff. If you want to test the dev version, just uninstall your current Mathematica plugin, download the plugin from the development branch here

https://github.com/halirutan/Mathematica-IntelliJ-Plugin/raw/develop/Mathematica-IntelliJ-Plugin.zip

and install it by going in IDEA to Settings -> Plugins -> Install from Disk.

Finally (really the last finally) I would appreciate if you read the Documentation here, try and test everything carefully and report issues back.

If you have specific questions, for instance how to use the latest features which are not in the documentation yet, don't hesitate to ping me in the stackexchange chat.

Cheers, Patrick (halirutan)

Bernd and George,

You are not the first people to encounter a problem launching Mathematica 10 from recent Wolfram Workbench. It seems to be erratic as to which computers and which projects.

Requests; please send this information to support@wolfram.com:

1) Under the Wolfram Workbench menu, About Wolfram Workbench item, the window shows a version number. Please send that. Also send the "Build" number if one is shown.

2) Try changing the path to Mathematica in the Workbench preferences from Default to the explicit full path. Do this even if the default value shown is correct. This is known to have helped in one case. Include in your email whether this helped.

3) The actual text of the error message, if any, and the symptoms.

4) And of course, please include the Mathematica license number or Activation Key and the operating system level.

Thank you.

Opening and debugging notebooks does not seem to work anymore with Mathematica 10 on OS X 10.9. When I try to open a notebook from Workbench, the notebook opens in Mathematica, but after a short while, Workbench displays a "Mathematica Notebook Launch" error. When I try to debug, I get the same error and the Workbench console shows "Start Debug Session\nTerminated". In Mathematica, I can not get the packages from my Workbench project, because the $Path variable does not include the project path. When I switch back to my Mathematica 9 installation using the Workbench preferences, everything works as expected.