IDE and plugin development

[Pål Baggethun]

Greetings!

I am wondering if someone have any experience using Eclipse IDE for
developing plugins for ImageJ. In that case, what is the most convenient
workspace configuration?


Sincerely
Paul Baggethun
Elkem Research

[simon andrews (BI)]

On 19 Aug 2008, at 08:51, Pål Baggethun wrote:

> Greetings!
>
> I am wondering if someone have any experience using Eclipse IDE for
> developing plugins for ImageJ. In that case, what is the most  
> convenient
> workspace configuration?

Yes, I've done this.

In the simplest form you just include ij.jar from ImageJ in your  
project build path and eclipse will then recognise all of the classes  
you'll need.  You don't need to import the actual jar into the  
project, just point eclipse at the copy in your ImageJ installation  
and it will work fine.  I have also tried importing classes from  
other plugins, but eclipse can get confused where included jars put  
classes into the default package (as most plugins do).

For actually running/testing your plugin I tended to add a main  
method to it to simulate being called from ImageJ.  It just loads an  
image to create an ImagePlus object and then passed that to the setup  
method.  How you do this will depend on what sort of a plugin you're  
writing.  You'll also need to remember to modify the VM arguments in  
the run settings to increase the amount of memory allocated as the  
default is usually too small.

It's also fairly easy to have a shell open with a command to copy the  
latest version of your plugin into a real ImageJ install so you can  
test it in-situ very quickly.

Simon.

[Sami Badawi-2]

Hi Paul,

I find it beneficial to use Eclipse together with the build system
Maven, for my medium sized project, ShapeLogic that is using more than
one unit test per plugin and is using several third party jar.

The advantages are:
* All the unit tests live in a different directory and are not
included when you build you plugin jar file
* It is simple to include external jar files and update them to use
newer version just by changing the version number
* You can run all your unit tests from command line using Maven or run
an individual unit test from Eclipse for debugging
* It is simple to build a plugin jar file from command line

The disadvantages are that it is more work to set up and more tools to
learn, so it is overkill to use Maven for small project.

I wrote a little description about how I set it up here
http://www.shapelogic.org/setup.html
Link to Maven: http://maven.apache.org/

-Sami Badawi
http://www.shapelogic.org

On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 3:51 AM, Pål Baggethun <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Greetings!
>
> I am wondering if someone have any experience using Eclipse IDE for
> developing plugins for ImageJ. In that case, what is the most convenient
> workspace configuration?
>
>
> Sincerely
> Paul Baggethun
> Elkem Research
>

[Volker Baecker]

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Hello,
I've been in holidays, so I only saw your question now. We will discuss
this question in my workshop at the ImageJ conference.
http://imagejconf.tudor.lu/programme/workshops/applying-best-practices-to-the%20development

Tbe setup that I propose is:
- - create a workspace
- - in the workspace create a project for imagej and import the imagej
source code
- - in the workspace create another project for your development
- - create a development-runtime folder on the same level as the above
workspace. This folder named "run" contains the imagej configuration
files, the plugin and macros folder, etc.
- - create a launch configuration that uses the "run" folder as working
directory. Add your project to the classpath.
- - develop your code in packages in your project. Write the plugin
interfaces in the default package.
- - Use an ant script that copies your plugins from the default package to
 your subfolder of the folder plugins in the folder "run"
- - You can add the ant script to the builders of your project. This way
it will be executed automatically when your code is compiled.

Here is the ant script I use:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<project name="copy plugins" default="Copy Plugins" basedir=".">

        <property name = "runtimePluginFolder"
value="$basedir/../../run/plugins/Montpellier RIO Imaging"/>
        <property name = "source" value="./bin/"/>
       
    <target name="Copy Plugins">
    <copy todir="${runtimePluginFolder}">
    <fileset dir="${source}">
    <include name="*.class"/>
  </fileset>
            </copy>
    </target>
</project>

For deployment another script is used, that creates jar files for the
plugins and puts them into a zip-file.

Best regards,
Volker Baecker


Pål Baggethun a écrit :

> Greetings!
>
> I am wondering if someone have any experience using Eclipse IDE for
> developing plugins for ImageJ. In that case, what is the most convenient
> workspace configuration?
>
>
> Sincerely
> Paul Baggethun
> Elkem Research
>

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passerelle antivirus du campus CNRS de Montpellier
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