Affiliation
Astronomical Society of South Australia (ASSAU)
Wed, 08/29/2018 - 14:15
Hi all
Getting started creating VStar plug-ins has not been very accessible before now.
Please find attached a README PDF file and a tool (plugin-dev.zip) attached.
Try the tool, ask questions, provide feedback.
Thanks.
David
File Upload
I gave this a try.
My environment is Win 10. Not doing much Java at this time, I simply have the JDK install and then installed ant as suggested. I could not get ant to run. I did a lot head scratching. I would either get ant to silently do nother when executed from the command prompt. Other times it would say things like
ant "=="" was unexpected at this time.
It turns out ant simply cannot handle file paths with spaces such as C:\Program Files\Java or similar for ANT_HOME. I redfined these HOMEs with the 8 character DOS-like names obtained from "dir /x" and it worked. I think I hear Linux calling...
I generated, jar-ed and installed an example. That is, I did not alter the example code at all. VStar failed to start with this jar in the plugin folder. I'm not sure is this is a problem or if you expected one would have to do some more work on it before compiling it. If this is unexpected and you would like more details, just let me know.
Since you obviously put some effort into this, I thought I would provide feedback. I did find that taking a observation source plugin for one of the existing ones provided a useful way to get started.
best regards,
Cliff
Hi Cliff
I'm sorry this didn't Just Work for you. It should have, but then, it has only been tested by me in a single environment so far (a Mac with Java version 1.8.0_131).
The examples should build, run and work without change. It's just the skeleton/templates that need work to do run without error or at least do anything, but they should also build.
What would help me figure this out is what you did once before when you had trouble building simple plugin code (from the plugin how-to doc as I recall): attach a text log of the commands you ran.
A couple of questions:
Thanks.
David
David,
Regarding the specific questions:
>which example plugin type was it? ObservationSource
> did you try wrapping the Ant path in double quotes? Yes. A Google search gave me the hit of the space in the file path. I decided to just remove that from the situation with the 8 character filenames.
So I retried twice more. Before each trial, I removed the plugin-dev directory tree and extracted again from the ZIP file. The first time everything worked as expected and I got VStar to run with the noisy cosine.
As I thought about it, I recalled that I had run "ant skeleton" immediately followed by "ant example" yesterday. So I tried again and repeated that additional step. This second time today it failed as I reported yesterday. Attached is the log of my commands, the dialog that appears instead of the Vstar main window and the java file that was generated.
I hope this helps,
Cliff
Thanks Cliff. I'll look at this.
David
Hi Cliff, all
The error you saw was related to skeleton source code returning null values where non-null strings were expected.
I've committed the changes and attached a zip here.
David