I have a large codebase added into the Eclipse project and have added one External Tool providing the path where the class for that java file is to be kept and the Classpath. The build folder is somewhere else.
Now when I need to compile only one file, Eclipse starts building whole of the codebase(>100 MB of Java files), it takes my system down and I have to wait for the whole compilation to go through.
Can only one java file be compiled without building the whole code?
Any pointers would be helpful.
I think you would benefit greatly with a build tool, such as ant or maven. You can have a target to compile only one class without building the whole code, or any other related task.
Have you built the project at least once ?
Eclipse builds incrementally using the saved state from the previous build. So if you build your project once, the subsequent builds would only pick up the changes made "after" the previous build.
Related
I've recently been tasked with working on an existing eclipse project that makes use of Builders to run Ant tasks under given conditions. I've never heard of Builders before yesterday, and I'm having difficulties getting the project to work in IntelliJ.
First of all, I would like to know if there is a way I can effectively trick Ant into running from a different base directory than what it already does. Consider the following screenshot from Eclipse:
Here, project A is running an Ant task in a local build file that extends a build file from project B. As you can see from the Base Directory setting, it is different from that of A. When I try to run the task from this build file in IntelliJ, I get build errors because certain directories do not exist in the folder for project A -- they are located in project B.
Secondly, this Builder is set to trigger on Manual Build and Auto Build, but my understanding is that this only triggers if the project the builder is attached to gets built. As far as I can tell, in IntelliJ, I can set an Ant task to trigger before or after a build, but it seems like this will be for the whole project, instead of just the relevant module that represents this Eclipse project. Is there a way I can make it only apply to a given module, or will I have to trigger it for changes to all modules?
Part of a project I'm on has a GUI app that is built with Netbeans using the GUI design tools that come in that IDE.
But this is only part of a bigger project, and needs to be built in an environment that does not have Netbeans installed (it happens to be a Gradle-based build on Jenkins). I've gotten builds to (seemingly) work, but keep running into inexplicable run-time errors (i.e., dependencies appear to be met with identical jars on the classpath and so on, but attempts to read resources from the project jar fail.).
From googling around, it looks like this might have something to do with compiling .form files and then including some dependency for the resulting java. (though, the Netbeans build does not add any jars above what our gradle build adds).
So the question is... can this even be done? or does a proper build simply rely on some hidden build-time mojo that's going on in Netbeans?
Yes, you can compile the classes without NetBeans. Just be sure you do not any NetBeans library, like AbsoluteLayout. The .form files are for NetBeans showing you components with Matisse, but all the generated code will be in the .java file.
I want my Ant build to take all Java sources from src/main/*, compile them, and place them inside bin/main/. I also want it to compile src/test/* sources to bin/test/. I wan this behavior because I want to package the binaries into different JARs, and if they all just go to a single bin/ directory it will be impossible* (extremely difficult!) to know which class files belong where.
When I go to configure my build path and then click the Source tab I see an area toward the bottom where it reads Default output folder: and then allows you to browser for its location.
I'm wondering how to create bin/main and bin/test in an existing project without "breaking" Eclipse (it happens). I'm also wondering that if I just have my Ant build make and delete those directories during the clean-n-build process, that Eclipse might not care what the default output is set to. But I can't find any documentation either way.
Thanks in advance for any help here.
In Eclipse, you can only have one output folder per project for your compiled Java files. So you cannot get Eclipse to do the split you want (i.e. compile src/main to bin/main and src/test to bin/test).
You can, if you want, create two Eclipse projects, one main project and one test project, where the test project depends on (and tests) the main project. However, in that case, each project should be in its own directory structure, which is not what you are asking for. But this is a common approach.
Another way, which I would recommend, would be to not mix Ant compilation and Eclipse's compilation. Make the Ant script the way you describe (i. e. compile the main and test directories separately and create two separate jar files). Change the Eclipse compile directory to something different, for instance bin/eclipse. Use the Ant script when making official builds or building for release. Use Eclipse's building only for development/debugging. This way, your two build systems will not get in each other's way and confuse each other.
Hope this answers your question and I understood it correctly. Good luck!
I have some data resources that I would like eclipse to not copy every time it builds. I put them as part of the build path so they get copied, but I don't want that to happen every time as it's time consuming.
Any idea on a better strategy?
I don't even want them to be deleted when clean is invoked. In Visual Studio one can mark a resource file as "copy once" is there such a thing in Eclipse.
Thank You
Having eclipse not copy some file that you have modified even after a clean will be a nightmare: you'll have to remember to copy it manually each time it's modified.
And Eclipse only copies files which have been modified when building incrementally.
If it's so slow, it probably means you have too many such files, and they should perhaps be put in a jar in the build path.
As you ask for a strategy, then ...
Eclipse is not a build tool, it's IDE. So you better not try to setup some build logic based on it. Use eclipse for coding and for performing specific tasks during build use build tools like maven or ant.
I'm trying to convert a Netbeans 6.9.1 project into a scripted build (without netbeans). Of course, it fails (or I wouldn't be asking for help).
In the failure it says that the org.apache.commons.httpclient package does not exist. (Of course, it worked when we ran the build in Netbeans).
Now I know exactly where the commons-httpclient.jar file is located in my project structure, but I can't seem to tell it to the compiler via the ant build files and the netbeans property files.
Perhaps related to this is when I ran "ant -v" to build my software, it said,
Property lib.mystuff.classpath has not been set. This variable is important, I guess, because
the file nbproject/project.properties uses lib.mystuff.classpath in its definition of javac.classpath, which of course tells the Java compiler where to find the JARs.
So...when moving a Netbeans project to a netbeans-independent scripted build, how can the build script set these properties? Also, how can I ensure that the jar file gets included in the ant build?
I appreciate any help I can get, as I am a Java newbie.
UPDATE AFTER ACCEPTING ANSWER FROM vkraemer:
There are a few best practices for build scripts for production software:
Put everything needed for a build under a single directory tree. (Netbeans = fail)
Put everything in source code control. (I did that)
The first line of the build script should clear all environment variables.
The next section of the build script should explicitly set all environment variables to values which are known to work.
The next part of the build should be able to execute using command-line programs such as javac, ant, cc, etc, and must not depend on firing up an IDE such as Eclipse or Netbeans.
It is a shame that Netbeans makes this hard.
I did a quick look in a Java Application project and found the following...
javac.classpath = ${libs.MyStuff.classpath}
libs.MyStuff.classpath is defined in %HOME%/.netbeans/6.9.1/build.properties.
You may be able to get by doing the following...
ant -Dlibs.MyStuff.classpath=c:\a\b\c.jar
You would need to do more if you have multiple jar files in the MyStuff library that you created in NetBeans.