IDE setup
Eclipse package
Like Freeplane, Eclipse is based on an OSGI kernel. For this reason Eclipse provides very good support for developing OSGI applications:
- All Bundle properties can be managed via the project properties.
- One launch configuration for eclipse in the Freeplane sources, freeplane_devresources/eclipse/freeplane-osgi.launch, uses Eclipse' standard OSGI implementation.
Note: Unlike in the "real application" it's necessary to list all plugins to load in the launch configuration. In the regularly deployed application all plugins in the plugin subdirectory are loaded. (By the way also the user's Freeplane directory is scanned for plugins in a plugin directory if this exists.)
Therefore you need an eclipse version with Plug-in Development Environment (PDE), for example Eclipse for RCP and RAP Developers
Settings
In project freeplane_devresources you find
- some launch configurations for starting the application
- eclipse code-templates, formatter and clean-up configuration files which must be used if you contribute your code to the project.
Version control integration
You can use eclipse bazaar plugin BzrEclipse. It requires the latest version of bazaar plug-in bzr-xmloutput which is not released yet but can be obtained directly from bazaar repository using command
bzr branch lp:bzr-xmloutput
Local code copy (branch) should be created using bzr or bzr-explorer as explained in Bazaar howto. After the freeplane projects are imported into eclipse workspace version control can be activated for them. Select the projects in the project explorer, right-click and perform team->Share project->Bazaar.
Useful Eclipse plugins
- For properties files, especially for language resources, the Properties Editor plugin is useful. Install the Properties Editor from the update site http://propedit.sourceforge.jp/index_en.html.
