Developing ImageJ in Eclipse
Avoid permissions issues. We recommend installing Eclipse outside of the
Program Files
directory. E.g.:C:\Users\frood\Programs\eclipse
, whereC:\Users\frood
is your user directory.
Configuring Eclipse. After installing Eclipse, you will need to configure it to know about your JDK.
Use Wordpad to edit the eclipse.ini
file in your Eclipse installation (e.g., C:\Users\frood\Programs\eclipse
). (Do not use Notepad, because it will not handle the Unix-style line breaks properly.) Carefully follow these instructions to specify the proper JDK. Then save the file and quit Wordpad.
Now update Eclipse's JRE to be JDK-aware:
- Launch Eclipse
- From the menu choose Window > Preferences
- Select Java > Installed JREs
- Click Search..., navigate to your JDK installation folder (e.g.,
C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.8.0_11
) and click OK - Check the box next to the JRE that appears and click OK
Avoid permissions issues. We recommend installing to
$HOME/eclipse
.
Do not use a package manager. For several reasons, we do not recommend installing Eclipse from a package manager. You may not get a new enough version of Eclipse (we recommend 4.3+), you will not get the Java Developers version that includes the M2E plugins, and you will likely have trouble installing additional plugins due to the permissions issues with the system-wide installation.
This article explains how to install and configure Eclipse for use with ImageJ development. Directions correspond to Eclipse 4.4 Luna, and may need adjustment for other versions.
Contents
Install and configure Eclipse
Install the Java Development Kit
- Download and install the Java Development Kit (JDK) from the Java web site.
Install Eclipse
- Download "Eclipse IDE for Java Developers" from the Eclipse web site.
- Unpack the archive to a location of your choice.
- See the right-hand sidebars for platform-specific notes.
Clone the source code
- Using your Git client of choice, clone the source code which interests you.
Import the source code
- Choose File > Import from the Eclipse menu
- Select "Existing Maven Projects" and click Next
- Browse to the folder where you cloned the project source code
- Click Finish
Launching ImageJ
If you cloned the imagej project, you can launch the program as follows:
- In the Package Explorer, expand the
imagej
project - Navigate into
src/main/java
- Navigate into
net.imagej
- Right-click on
Main.java
- Choose "Run As" and then "Java Application"
Other projects will have different main classes.