Development tools

All tools described in this document have an edition that can be used without cost.

Minimal environment

Setting up the environment needed for building Endefr is easy. You only have to install JDK 5.0 and Ant.

The other tool needed is TestNG, but its JAR file is included in the project source.

Eclipse

To be able to run the build targets from inside Eclipse you need to add tools.jar from the JDK to the global entries of the Ant classpath. The Ant classpath can be found on the Classpath tab at Ant/Runtime in the preferences.

Daily builds

The host on which the daily builds are made also requires CVS (or CVSNT) to be installed and on the path, and JSch to be present in the ANT_HOME/lib directory.

There are issues with starting the daily build from inside Eclipse, even when you run it in a separate JVM (which is the default). The sshexec task hangs indefinitely, even when you specify a timeout. The solution to this problem has not been found yet.

Recommended tools

Although the focus of the tools described below is on Eclipse as the IDE, we welcome contributions of project files of other IDEs.

Eclipse

Eclipse is a powerful IDE for Java development. Because Endefr is built on Java 5, Eclipse 3.1 or higher is needed.

The project files for Eclipse are included in the Endefr sources.

Below is a list of recommended plugins.

TestNG

If you want to run the tests from inside Eclipse you have to install the TestNG plugin.

XMLBuddy

XMLBuddy is a great XML editor for editing the few XML files present in the Endefr project.

Properties Editor for Eclipse

The Properties Editor for Eclipse helps with editing properties files containing characters beyond the ones in the ISO-8859-1 character set. It will translate these charaters to Unicode escapes for you.

JarPlug

With JarPlug you can view, and modify, the contents of JAR and Zip files without leaving Eclipse.

Version Tree

With the Eclipse Version Tree Plugin you can view the CVS history of a resource in a diagram, instead of as a list as with the resource history built in to Eclipse.

QuickImage

With QuickImage you can view and browse images without leaving Eclipse. Unfortunately the site is offline so you can no longer obtain it from the official source.

XMLmind XML Editor

As all documentation for the Endefr project is written in XHTML, a good XHTML editor will help you write documents faster by allowing you to concentrate on the content instead of the XHTML syntax.

The XMLmind XML Editor does just that. It is not a WYSIWYG editor, but it does use different styles for different tags. We highly recommend this one.

GIMP

GIMP is an image manipulation program which can be used to edit the images for the documentation.


The project page of Endefr at SourceForge.net