[krieck]

I'm a big fan of the RobotBuilder, and encourage our programmers to use it, at least at first. With novice programmers, I can walk them through creating a driving robot in fifteen minutes.

If you haven't seen it, I recommend watching Brad Miller's videos. RobotBuilder is a wizard that puts together a command-based robot. Without RobotBuilder, you would need to understand the command-based software architecture first, and then do the low level coding of commands and subsystems later. By starting with RobotBuilder, would can construct the architecture in a visual manner, and then start your work on the low level components.

It does some of the code, but there will still be tons of work left to do. It will not make coding easy, but it will give you a solid foundation on which to work. Also, you will absolutely need to understand the resulting code; you will have serious problems if you don't eventually understand how the command pattern works.

There are lots of other pros and cons. On the plus side, it generates a wiring diagram that is terrific for communicating with the electrical team. On the minus side, it generates some ugly code that might not work exactly how some coders want. It sometimes forgets to import all necessary classes. Also, keeping the code and the robot file in sync can be problematic.