I tried the BoxLang extension for Visual Studio Code today and at first it didn’t do a lot.
tl;dr you have to have Java installed. You can type java -version into your terminal to see if you have installed it.
What didn’t work?
- Language server didn’t link anything - I could not Ctrl+Click on let’s say a function and jump directly to the function definition.
- “BoxLang: Run file” did open the “Run and Debug” view, displayed a process under “Callstack” and then did nothing. I could re-run it and it would just add another process under “Callstack”. I could not terminate them other than restarting the VS Code extension host.
The only hint I had was in the VS Code “Output” tab under “boxlang”, stating that something Java related failed, “start ENOENT”.
Solution
Install Java. And if you’re a Java noob like me, I eventually downloaded JDK 22. I tried to download JRE first, but somehow ended up installing Java 1.8 or something, which then lead me to the error that the BoxLang extension was compiled with a Java Class File Version 61.0 and mine only supported up to Version 55.0 and I had to run a Java removal tool to get rid of the old version.
Adding the BoxLang .jar file
I have only played with BoxLang via the Docker image, so I have not installed BoxLang yet. If you did the same, you can just download the .jar file from the BoxLang download page to somewhere like C:\boxlang\boxlang-1.0.0-all.jar and paste that path into the VS Code extension’s settings for the BoxLang extension.
Hope this helps anybody.
Cheers, Boris