Building from Eclipse/Netbeans

[nhtshot]

You'll have to forgive my ignorance, but as I've said, I'm new to JAVA.

I've been trying for sometime to successfully build DFM from Eclipse or Netbeans and have nothing to show for it except a large bruise on my forehead from banging it against the desk.

I'm well versed in SVN, I have no problem downloading the tree. I've tried importing the build.xml into eclipse and it basically takes a giant shit all over it. I've tried creating a project and importing the folders to no avail. It never manages to find all the classes. I also cannot for the life of me figure out how to get Eclipse to find the ME base classes. Today, I was finally fed up with eclipse and decided to give netbeans a whirl. No love there either. It keeps wanting to try to build the thing using my native JDK instead of ME.

Perhaps what I'm after doesn't exist. I've done quite a bit of mobile device development using C# and visual studio. In there, it's a simple matter of creating a project, choosing a device class and bam! you're ready to go. The emulator works, debugging works, and if you hook up the actual device you can deploy debug builds directly.

I'm hoping to figure out some sort of similar arrangement to work on this, but none of the tools I've using seem to be able to even build the damned thing, let alone provide an easy mechanism for testing.

My questions are the following:

1. "I myself use Eclipse" What exactly do you use it for? Are you just using it as a glorified text editor and then building from a console? Do you debug and test directly? Can you use the emulator from it?

2. If you answer yes to any of the above, can you please check your "project file" into SVN and maybe put up some quick notes about what plugins you have installed and how they're configured?

I appreciate your help. I've avoided posting again since I didn't want to take up your time with what should be trivial things, but I'm just not getting anywhere productive and I want to actually start getting some real work done.

Sean

[Gert]

Sean,

I've done quite a bit of mobile device development using C#

Aha ... maybe you'd like to work on a port of DfM to Windows Mobile 7 ?


About your problems: For Java ME development you should install Sun's Wireless toolkit. That toolkit includes all the jar-files and tools that are needed for Java ME development. I hope that this will solve your problems. You can download it here: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javame/downloads/sdk30-jsp-139759.html

Sun's Wireless toolkit is a standalone product. But you can use the jar-files etc. also from Eclipse.

I guess we should be more definite in our 'development description' about installing Sun's Wireless toolkit. Currently there is only stated "For compiling the DictionaryForMIDs Java ME application, most people install Sun's Java ME SDK". I think we should rephrase it to "For compiling the DictionaryForMIDs Java ME application, you must install the Sun's Java ME SDK (other toolsets may work also)".

1. "I myself use Eclipse" What exactly do you use it for? Are you just using it as a glorified text editor and then building from a console? Do you debug and test directly? Can you use the emulator from it?

I personally use Eclipse in Java ME development for
- glorifed text editor
- building via build.xml
- accessing svn (however somehow I recently screwed up my 'subversive'-configuration)
- debugging (well, long time sine I tried that with an emulator)

2. If you answer yes to any of the above, can you please check your "project file" into SVN and maybe put up some quick notes about what plugins you have installed and how they're configured?

I can make my project file available for download (however it is not worth being put in SVN !).
I have a few plugins, such as for XML-development (you would not need those) and for accessing Subversion (that already works for you). Apart from this I myself do not use any special plugins. Just let me mention that there are Java ME plugins around which will allow you to create a Java ME project etc. as you mentioned in your posting. I never made an effort to install one of those because (1) I did not feel that these would be useful to me and (2) they seemed to be rather 'beta'-products at the time when I read about those (i.e. not yet reliable to use). Those plugins also claim to provide special debugging support with emulators.


Just let me mention that apart from Java ME there is also an Android port of DfM, which uses Android tools except of Java ME tools.

I appreciate your help. I've avoided posting again since I didn't want to take up your time with what should be trivial things, but I'm just not getting anywhere productive and I want to actually start getting some real work done.

The best thing about the DfM project is that there are people who contribute and who support others   So keep asking !

Best regards,
Gert

[Gert]

Concerning my .project-file: I just realize that I have several of these files.

I have a separate Eclipse-project for each DfM tool/application, I made a screenshot in the attachment.

Regards,
Gert

[nhtshot]

I've done quite a bit of mobile device development using C#

Aha ... maybe you'd like to work on a port of DfM to Windows Mobile 7 ?

Doing and liking are two very different things!

Actually, my goal is to add multimedia functionality to the mobile Java version. I have a Nokia phone and am currently slogging my way through learning Chinese. I want to add pronunciation sound files and "how to draw" stroke order gifs to the cedict dictionary. Of course, that entails adding the multimedia abilities to DFM.

I also want to add some more intelligence to the search functions, specifically relating to some quirks of chinese. Many words are composed of multiple characters which have discrete meanings as well. To the non-speaker, it's oftentimes impossible to determine what is a multi-character word and what isn't. My thought is to change the search algorithm so it can return sub-sets of the entered text. That way, if I type 3 characters and the first 2 are a 2 character word, it will return the 2 character word assuming there isn't a valid 3 character word.

So, those are my long term goals. Of course, by the time I get that stuff done I probably won't need it anymore!

Concerning my .project-file: I just realize that I have several of these files.

I have a separate Eclipse-project for each DfM tool/application, I made a screenshot in the attachment.

Regards,
Gert

Thanks, I'll try setting it up that way to see what happens. I've also found that NetBeans has a pretty reasonable ME plugin. I'm experimenting with that now.

Sean

[nhtshot]

 Finally! Success!

I settled on netbeans, since the MIDP plugin seems pretty slick. I built a project for DictionaryForMIDs, one for JavaME, stuffed into new directories, pointed the source to your directories from SVN, copied a dictionary into the res folder so it would get included in the JAR and BAM, it works.

Now I just have to get down to the actual work of adding the things I want to add.

Sean

[Gert]

Great !!

Having multimedia support will be fantastic - so we wait and see what you will do 

Regards,
Gert

[Gert]

Sean,

and one more remark: please stay synchronized with us on what you plan to do and how you intend to do this. For example, what features exactly would you like to add (for example a predefined "sound content" and a predefined "picture content"); what Java classes do you intend to modify etc.

If we co-ordinate in detail beforehand, then after a final review your extensions could directly into the DictionaryForMIDs baseline in SVN.

Regards,
Gert