Eclipse Setup

The easiest solution for Windows machines is to use the very nice Ninite bundled installed 1. It will allow you to install both the Java Software Development Kit (SDK) and the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE) at the same time.

Here are the steps to follow:

At this point you should be able to find Eclipse in your installed applications, or as a shortcut on your desktop.

If you’re nervous about using Ninite—despite their backing by Y Combinator and glowing reviews by PC World and others—perhaps this will assuage your fears. I actually went to school with Patrick Swieskowski, one of the Ninite co-founders. He’s both a great guy and a tremendous developer. I would trust him to install software on my machine 3.

On Mac there are two steps to installing Eclipse. First, you must install the Java Software Development Kit (SDK):

Next, install the latest version of Eclipse:

By default Eclipse installs itself into an eclipse folder in your home directory. If you want it in your applications, move the installed binary into your Applications folder.

The first step when running Linux is to install Oracle Java. You can follow these instructions on the Java homepage. Many distributions also have Sun Java packages as well—for example, Ubuntu and Mint users can follow these instructions to use the Web Upd8 PPA.

To get Eclipse, start by downloading the Eclipse Oxygen tarball from the Eclipse homepage. Unpack it and you should have a executable binary. The screencast above walks you through that process.

Subversion is a software version control system (VCS). It allows both individual developers and teams to work together more effectively. You will use Subversion to retrieve your machine problem (MP) assignments, and to submit your solutions.

To install the Subversive Subversion Eclipse plugin, follow the following instructions:

Now we need to install some additional software to allow Subversion to connect to our course repository. Continue by following these instructions to set up so-called Subversive connectors:

When you write code, style matters. This is particularly important as you start to work with others. Inconsistent style produces code that is hard for others to read and understand.

As a result, almost all large 4 software projects produce style guidelines. These are rules about how code should be formatted to ensure consistency across multiple developers. Some languages, like Go, have even gone as far to make certain stylistic choices part of the code language specification.

To prepare you for the big wide communal world of programming, we’re going to have you install and use an Eclipse style checking plugin. checkstyle is a Java style checking tool that is used and supported by large companies that write Java—including Google 5. Our style guidelines are based on the Sun Code Conventions.

Installing the checkstyle plugin for Eclipse is fairly easy by using the software marketplace:

Writing good tests are an important part of effective software development. Eclipse comes with built-in support for the JUnit testing framework, but we may want to experiment with another testing framework called TestNG. It has some nice features that JUnit lacks—even if it has a much uglier website.

The process is quite similar to the one for checkstyle:

Building large software projects consisting of multiple source code files is a complex process. To address this problem, developers frequently use so-called build systems to automate this process. Build systems can intelligently determine what steps need to be taken to build a complete application, automatically do things like check style (using tools like checkstyle) or run tests (using tools like TestNG). We’re also going to use Gradle to run the tests on your code that will produce your grade for each MP.

Gradle is a build system. It is frequently used for Java projects, but can be used to build a variety of different kinds of software projects.

The instructions that follow are slightly different for Oxygen and Neon, so make sure that you follow the ones appropriate to your version of Eclipse.