[Nodal-j-devel] Eclipse setup quirks

[Nelson S. <ns...@te...>]

Hi everyone,

Lee recommended a new tool called Eclipse for developing Java.  I've tried 
it out, and it is way faster, and more convenient to use when executing 
Ant.  It also has a nice interface for navigating within a Java file, and 
display an outline of the Java.


Here is the link to the latest stable version:
http://download.eclipse.org/downloads/drops/S-M1-200306051737/index.php

Even on this page there is a separate download for JUnit, I found this SDK 
download includes everything already.  I was successful in getting SSH CVS 
working within Eclipse, so say goodbye to WinCVS.  Also Ant is working 
fine, and compiles faster than in Netbeans.  Ant can be configured to run 
using a single mouse click macro too, so it's less cumbersome than Netbeans.

Quirks to look out for:

1) You don't have to install Eclipse, you just unzip and run the executable.
2) To check out nodal from CVS within Eclipse
	o Go to Windows->Show View->Other.  Then under CVS, select CVS Repositories
	o A new console will pop up on the bottom pane.  Right click create a new 
repository location
	o Enter the same stuff as in WinCVS, just note that the connection type 
should be set to extssh
	o Upon hitting ok, it'll log in automatically.  You'll want to check out 
nodal from the head branch.  Just right click on nodal under HEAD, and go 
checkout.  There's no need to start a new project or anything.  This will 
do it all.

3) To get ANT going, you'll need to specify where tools.jar is, or it will 
complain that it can't find where javac is.  To so this, go to 
Window->Preference, under Ant, Runtime, specify 
c:\j2sdk1.4.1_02\lib\tools.jar under classpath.  Now you can run ANT.

4) The first time you run ANT, you'll want to change it from the default 
compile target.  Right click on build.xml, select Run ANT.  Uncheck 
compile, and check clean and unit.  Click the order button, and ensure 
clean comes before unit.  (Doing the clean seems to get rid of the ZIP 
warnings we get.  This fact was known even in Netbeans, but manually doing 
clean each time was slow and annoying. )  Now you can use the run Ant 
button in the top toolbar to run ANT with a single click.


Hope this was useful.

Cheers,
Nelson