Eclipse as a development tool for FRC programming

[BradAMiller]

There is a new experimental eclipse plugin available for Java programming. It has the features of the NetBeans plugin plus a "Robot Centric" view of your project. You can create devices and mechanisms by combining elements from the palette. You need to select the Robot Perspective in the Window menu to see all the new features. Please refer to the help that comes with eclipse for more information. And see the FAQ (Wiki) for more information on installing and using the plugin.

Please post any issues in the Trackers area on the WPILib FIRSTForge project.

[java4first]

Has anyone gotten this to work? I downloaded the updates into Eclipse 3.6 Release 1 on Windows, and I have an error about a missing class file in Java perspective when I try to build my sample project it creates.

When I switched to the robot perspective, it looks like it tries to build the missing stuff(?), but that fails as well.

As requested, I posted a problem in the Java Trackers on FIRSTForge- but I wanted to see if someone here had gotten it going.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Stu

[Ryan O]

java4first:

When you setup Eclipse, you must configure it to use a Java Development ToolKit(JDK) as opposed to the default, which is a Java Runtime Environement(JRE) which is what you usually install to run java. This is because the JDK contains tools Ant uses to build the libraries, and deploy them. NetBeans, during setup, forces users to install and indicate the location of a JDK. Eclipse does not - this is due to the fact that NetBeans uses Ant more heavily it its own operation than Eclipse. Instructions for setting up Eclipse to use a JDK can be found under Help->Help Contents->FRC Java Development Tools->Troubleshooting->Setting up Eclipse with a JDK.

Additionally, in order to build or deploy a FRC project properly, with a files from the project selected, or by right-clicking the project, select Run->Run As-> and then either FRC Java Build or FRC Java Deploy. There is also a way to run in Debug mode which requires extra steps to connect to the robot. This is all detailed in the FRC Java Development Plug-ins help content under "Launching"

As a side note, thank you for including detailed information in your bug report, it made it extremely easy to identify the issue you were having.

Good luck this season!

[java4first]

Just to close the loop on this - we got it working with no problems (once we got past the problem with the JDK). Right now we have Eclipse working on a mix of Fedora 10 (don't ask) Linux, Windows XP and Windows 7, and Mac OS X 6(?) machines. It's pretty slick ... [A big shout out to Ryan for getting me up and going so quickly].