Development Environment

Setup Eclipse for CoreASM code development

This section will guide you through the environment setup process for the CoreASM development using Eclipse. First, the Eclipse plugins Marketplace, maven (for building CoreASM), and git (for version management) have to be installed. After that, we will guide you through your first build and start of CoreASM.

Installing Eclipse

1. download and install Eclipse Juno 4.2.2 classic or Eclipse Kepler 4.3.2 classic
2. start Eclipse and open the "Help"-menu inside Eclipse

Installing the Marketplace

The Eclipse Marketplace Client offers some more comfort to find and install additional third party components for Eclipse. We will install it to ease the installation of further components.

1. select the menu item "Install New Software..."
2. in "work with" select "--All available Sites--"
3. type "marketplace" as filter text
4. select "Marketplace Client" for install and press the "Next"-button
5. confirm the selection of the "Marketplace Client" for installation by pressing the "Next"-button
6. accept the license and start the installation by pressing the "Finish"-button
7. now, restart Eclipse and continue to set up your environment

Install Maven for Eclipse and eGit

First, visit http://git-scm.com/ and install the current version of git (or use your package manager to install git). Now, inside Eclipse perform the following steps:

1. start Eclipse and open the "Help"-menu inside Eclipse
2. select the menu item "Eclipse Marketplace ..."
3. type "maven newer" into the search field and hit the "return"-key
4. press the "install"-button for "Maven Integration for Eclipse (Juno or newer")
5. press the "Back"-button, type "egit" into the search field and hit the "return"-key
6. press the "install"-button for "EGit" press the "Next"-button
7. confirm the selection of the "EGit" and "Maven" for installation by pressing the "Next"-button
8. accept the license and start the installation by pressing the "Finish"-button
9. now, restart Eclipse again

Getting the sources of CoreASM (the Eclipse way ;-)

1. From the menu choose "File" > "Import"
2. select "Git" > "Projects from git" and press the "Next"-button
3. select "clone URI" and press the "Next"-button again
4. type "https://github.com/CoreASM/coreasm.core.git" into the field "URI" and press the "Next"-button
5. select only the "master"-branch and press again the "Next"-button
6. choose a destination directory for the CoreASM sources and press "Next" again
7. select "Import as general project" and press the "Finish"-button Now, a new project coreasm.core is visible in the Eclipse Package-Explorer. Next, we want to import our local CoreASM sources as separate Maven-Projects.
8. From the menu choose "File" > "Import"
9. select "Maven" > "Existing Maven projects" and press the "Next"-button
10. confirm the found CoreASM projects to be imported by pressing the "Next"-Button
11. confirm the "Setup Maven plugin connectors"-dialog by pressing this and the "Finish"-button of the next dialog
12. the Tycho installer will appear. You have to follow the instructions on the screen.
13. when the warning appears that you are installing unsigned content, you have to press the "Okay"-button to continue
14. last, restart Eclipse Now, you have successfully imported the sources of CoreASM into Eclipse as Maven projects via git. If you like, you can delete the coreasm.core project (which appeared after the git import), but do not delete its file content on the hard disc!

Building and Running CoreASM

Before building you have to make sure that you have installed at least Java Development Kit 1.6 or higher. You can find Java at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/ . You can check if your java installation is correctly integrated into Eclipse in the menu under "Windows" > "Preferences". Type "jres" into the filter and have a look at "Installed JREs".

To build CoreASM you have to perform just two steps:

1. perform a right-click on the project "org.coreasm.parent" and select "Run As" > "Maven install"
2. press "Alt+F5" to update the all Maven projects (so that referenced libraries, like org.coreasm.engine.jar in org.coreasm.eclipse, are integrated into the project's configuration)

For development, we prefer to deactivated the automatic build in the menu "Project" > "Build Automatically". After that, once call "Project" > "clean", then select "Clean all projects" and uncheck "Start a build immediately", before pressing the "OK"-button.

Launching CoreASM Eclipse

To start CoreASM Eclipse

1. right-click on the project "org.coreasm.eclipse" and select "Run As" > "Eclipse Application"

To test, if your CoreASM is running successful, you can either look up the "about"-dialog which should list all the plugins of CoreASM or you can take an sample specification from org.coreasm.eclipse/rsc/sampleSpecs copy ti to a project in inside the new CoreASM Eclipse instance and run or debug the specification. You can find a manual inside the folder org.coreasm.eclipse/rsc/doc.

If you are running large specifications, please edit the run configuration for CoreASM and increase the memory limit. For example the vm-arguments could be changed to/extended by "-XX:MaxPermSize=1024m -Xms256m -Xmx1024m".

Code Conventions

CheckStyle

We are following a modified version of Sun Java coding conventions. If you are contributing to the CoreASM, it is recommended that you install the CheckStyle plugin in your Eclipse environment and use it as a guidance to cleanup your code before submitting it to the repository. You can install CheckStyle using their update site: (http://eclipse-cs.sf.net/update)

We have created a CheckStyle configuration for CoreASM based on its default "Sun Checks (Eclipse)" configuration with some modification. The configuration file is 'checkstyle-coreasm.config.xml' and is located in the 'org.coreasm.parent' project. In order to import this configuration, follow these steps:

1. Open the Eclipse preferences window and then open CheckStyle preferences panel.
2. In the CheckStyle configuration panel, press the 'New...' button.
3. In the new window, change the type of the configuration to 'External Configuration File'.
4. Set the location of the file to that of the 'checkstyle-coreasm.config.xml' file, give the configuration the name 'CoreASM', and Press 'OK'.
5. Make the new configuration the default one by pressing the 'Set as Default' button.
6. Make sure that you enable CheckStyle for your project. This can be done from the project properties.

FindBugs

If you are contributing to the CoreASM, it is also recommended that you install the FindBugs Eclipse plugin and check your code for potential bugs before submitting it to the CoreASM repository.

You can install the FindBugs Eclipse plugin from their update site: [http://findbugs.cs.umd.edu/eclipse]