This tutorial is primarily for the students in my 420-517 Software Development Project course at Dawson College. It explains how to set up a workspace in Eclipse for this course. These instructions are important because Eclipse stores workspace specific settings in the workspace itself. This means that should you create a new workspace you will need to redo these settings. When you start Eclipse you are asked for the name of the workspace you want to use. If this is the first time you are using Eclipse the workspace launcher will appear as:
Eclipse wants to create a workspace called workspace in your home directory. On Linux and Mac systems you have a Home volume. In Windows the matching space is the folder with your name in the Users folder. If you have used Eclipse on the computer previously then it will show you the last workspace that you used. Pull down the combo box and you will get a list of all the workspaces that you have used. I prefer to have my workspace name indicate what I am doing. Therefore I never accept the default name and instead use a more meaningful name. Dawson Note: On the lab computers the default workspace is in C:\Users\Administrator\workspace. Here is my workspace choice for this tutorial:
After pressing OK Eclipse will start up. I configure Eclipse with the Subclipse plugin for Subversion. For that reason I get the following modal dialog (a dialog that demandsattention).
I usually un-check this simply to reduce the traffic over the network. In the school lab this is a good idea. Now we can see the Eclipse program as it appears when a new workspace is selected. Depending on the plugin that you have installed this screen may look slightly different. If you use an existing workspace then this will not appear and you will go directly to the workbench. The workbench is what we call the screen with all the windows we can use in Eclipse.
Click on the X on the Welcome tab or click on the toilet paper roll to get to the workbench.
It’s not really a toilet roll but it sure looks like one to me. The version of Eclipse that we use at Dawson is configured for Java EE. As we are going to create a desktop application we should change the perspective. A perspective is the arrangements and choices of windows on the workbench. Here is the Java EE perspective:
Go to Window -> Open Perspective and chose Java.
The workbench will now look like:
We are now ready to create our first project. We will only create Maven managed projects that use my Super Pom File (see http://netbeans.dzone.com/nb-class-maven-4-kf). From the File menu select New -> Other
The New dialog will appear for you to select a wizard. Scroll down to Maven and select Maven Project and click on Next.
On the New Maven Project you must check Create a simple project (skip archetype selection).
If you forget to do this you will see:
Click on the Back button, check Create a simple project and when all is well you should see:
Fill in the form as follows but replace my name with yours and chose appropriate names and description for your project.
Click on Finish and the project should appear in the Package Explorer. Open up the project tree by clicking on the small triangle and you should see:
There are two last tasks we must complete before we can start coding. The first thing is to change the JRE System Library. We will be using Java 1.8 and the pom.xml file will indicate Java 1.8. The Maven plugin in Eclipse is configured to default to Java 1.5. Right mouse click on JRE System Library (J2SE-1.5) and select Build Path -> Configure Build Path.
You should see:
Click on Remove and Java will disappear. We need to put in Java 1.8.
Select Add Library and you will see:
Select JRE System Library and click on Next. You should now see:
This is the dialog for a computer that only has Java 1.8 on it. It declares that the default JRE is a jre (jre1.8.0_20) which is wrong. It must be a JDK. Click on Installed JREs and you will get:
Click on the row and select Edit. This will let you point at the JDK instead of the JRE.
Now click on Directory and browse to the JDK. Here is what it looks like on my system:
Click OK and back on the Edit JRE dialog change the JRE name to jdk.
Once this is resolved click on Finish and the Preferences should look like:
Click on Ok and the Add Library should look like:
The Java Build Path will now be:
Click on OK and the Package Explorer should look like:
** Note: An error in the first posting is now corrected. In the subsequent images the JRE System Library will show jre1.8.0_20 but if you are following these instructions it will be the correct jdk1.8.0_20.
The last step is to update the pom.xml file. Double click on it and you will the Overview tab of the Maven pom file editor.
Switch to the pom.xml tab and you will see the raw file. If you close the Task List and Outline tabs on the right side of the workbench you will have a larger editor window.
You will now need the Super Pom xml file. You can retrieve it at the end of the article at http://netbeans.dzone.com/nb-class-maven-4-kf. Copy it from the article and paste it in a file that you can use each time you create a new project. I keep mine in a file called super_pom.xml. In Eclipse open this file from File -> Open File. It will appear in the Eclipse XML Editor looking like:
Switch to the Source tab and you will see:
Copy the contents of the file starting at the <developers> tag till the end of the file. Go to the pom.xml file of the project and paste what you copied over the </project> tag. It should look like:
Go to the Source menu and select Format to clean up the indenting. If you have any errors in the pom.xml they are likely due to having a second </project> tag or that you pasted the entire super_pom.xml file into you own pom.xml. These can be easily fixed by deleting the duplicated information. Correct the values in the <developer> section. Go to the <properties> section and correct the <mainClass> tag to show the name of your class that will contain the main method including the full path.
You are now ready to write code.
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