Development

Coding Style Guide

• real tabs
• 4-space indent for tabs
• import statement ordering: Eclipse defaults
• max line length: undecided (but one of the developers uses 100 column max)

Dev Environment Setup

Ubuntu

The following combination of Ubuntu and Eclipse versions are known to work:

• Ubuntu 16.04 LTS / Eclipse Mars.2 (4.5.2)
• Ubuntu 16.10 / Eclipse Mars.2 (4.5.2)
• Ubuntu 17.04 / Eclipse Neon.3 (4.6.3)

Other combinations may also work but but haven't been verified.

Eclipse Incompatibility with GTK3

Eclipse Mars and Neon are broken under all versions of Ubuntu mentioned above (16.04, 16.10 and 17.04) due to incompatibility with GTK3 (See Eclipse bug, askubuntu 16.04, askubuntu 16.10, stackoverflow 16.04). The symptom of this problem shows up as Eclipse missing a bunch of tool buttons at the top, and the console prints out a whole bunch of errors like:

(Eclipse:9643): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_base64_encode_step: assertion 'in != NULL' failed
(Eclipse:9643): 
Gtk-WARNING **: Negative content height -3 (allocation 1, extents 2x2) while allocating gadget (node toolbar, owner GtkToolbar)

The easiest solution is run the eclipse binary with the SWT_WEBKITT and SWT_GTK3 environment variables set like this:

$ SWT_WEBKIT2=1 SWT_GTK3=0 $HOME/eclipse/java-neon/eclipse/eclipse

or

$ SWT_WEBKIT2=1 SWT_GTK3=0 $HOME/eclipse/java-mars/eclipse

where $HOME/eclipse/java-neon and $HOME/eclipse/java-mars are the directories where you installed Eclipse.

You can create a shell script in $HOME/bin or define aliases in your $HOME/.bashrc (or the equivalent startup file for your own shell program).

Java

There are 2 versions of Java that you can run on Ubuntu:

• OpenJDK
• Oracle Java

I've had problems with OpenJDK (I can't remember if it was this project or another project), so I generally use Oracle Java instead. Oracle Java is not supported by the Ubuntu repositories. You can use the WebUpd8 Personal Package Archives (PPA) which maintain the Oracle packages that you can install using the familiar apt command. Do the following:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-installer
$ sudo apt-get install oracle-java9-installer

Unfortunately, WebUpd8 no longer maintains Java 6 and Java 7. To develop UCanAccess against these versions, you need to go to the Oracle Java website and manually download and install the JDK. You need to create a support account at Oracle to access those files, but you don't need to pay anything (at this time this wiki was written).