Setting up a MAEviz development environment

1. Download Eclipse This should work with the latest version of Eclipse; however, it has been tested and verified with Eclipse Galileo SR2 which you can download here. Select the Eclipse for RCP/Plug-in developers download for your system specification.
2. Install Eclipse Unpack Eclipse and launch the IDE.
3. Get an SVN client for Eclipse Our source code is stored in Subversion, so you will need an SVN client. You can
4. Connect to the MAEviz source repository Our repository is available read-only from svn://subversion.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ncsa-plugins/ or read-write if you have an account from svn+ssh://<username>@subversion.ncsa.uiuc.edu/CVS/ncsa-plugins/
5. Checkout the plugins source Because the list of plugins in MAEviz is always changing, the most reliable way to determine which plugins to get is by checking the defining product. First, download the ncsa.maeviz.rcp plugin. Open the maeviz.feature.product (if you are using eclipse 3.5) file, and find the list of features. You will need to check out each of these features. Then, for each feature, you will need to checkout each plugin listed in the feature.xml file. Plugins that are not in our repository are plugins that come with eclipse, and thus do not need to be checked out separately.  Alternatively, you may check out all the plugins under ncsa-plugins, which will give you additional plugins that aren't part of MAEviz, but reduces the amount of manual labor in determining which plugins to grab.

MAEviz is developed using the Eclipse RCP platform and Java.  Understanding the APIs of these evironments, and how to use Eclipse for development, is outside the scope of this document.  Developers will need to be very familiar with Java programming and somewhat familiar with Eclipse RCP to be productive doing MAEviz development.