Developing the library

This article explains how to develop the library.

IDE to build the project

The library is developed using Netbeans. We use for the moment the Netbeans 12.5.

The structure of the Netbeans project contains:

• A build.xml build file which is the ant file which is used to build the jar files of the project and create the distribution
• A nbproject directory which is a specific Netbeans directory used to specify the properties of the project

It is possible to use Eclipse to build this project, but you will have to create your own project for Eclipse.

JDK version

Netbeans 12.5 runs on Java 8 and 11. You will need to specify a JDK 8 version at the beginning of the build.xml file. For example:

      <property name="jdk" value="C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.8.0_152"/>

It will be useful to:

• Build the jars of the library which depend on JavaFX
• Produce the javadocs

Samples project

The samples sub-directory contains a project for the samples and tutorials.

Development dependencies

Several jar files are used as libraries for the project development. They are defined in the development dependencies article.

Ant targets

Main targets

The main targets are:

• The jar target, used with the Clean and Build Project for Netbeans, is used to generate all the jar files (for all the roots)
• The javadoc target is used to generate the javadoc for the project

Generating the wiki

• The copyjavadoc target is used to copy the javadoc of the project for the generation of the wiki. You must run the javadoc target prior to this target
• The generateWiki target is used to generate the wiki for the project. You must must run the copyjavadoc target prior to this target
• The generateTutorial target is used to generate the wikis for the tutorials

Deploy targets

The main targets are:

• The deploy target is used to deploy the resulting files
• The deploy-to-samples target is used to deploy the library to the samples project
• The zip target is used to produce the zip files