www.pitonyak.org

I am very comfortable at a command line prompt and a simple text editor to produce code. Sure, I prefer to use a smart code editor that is context aware, but, when things fall apart, my simple text editor always comes through for me. On a Windows machine, I use TSE Pro for Windows (see http://www.semware.com/). Many years ago, I wrote an article comparing different programming editors for OS/2 (yea, that was a long time ago), and TSE Pro was my favorite. Well, I still use it; now if only there was a Linux version.

While developing QT applications, I use the tools that come with QT. For my own Java projects, I usually use NetBeans. That said, Eclipse seems to have the greatest market share, and obviously most of my Java Developer friends are relatively happy with Eclipse.

Sometimes I hate eclipse. I am ignoring obvious reasons such as the numerous crashes that I had last week (because there were so many other variables that may have contributed; such as the VM or plug-ins). I wanted to accomplish a simple task; add a jar file to a bundle in a large project; working on an Eclipse plug-in project.

In NetBeans, I right clicked on libraries and selected add Jar/Folder, and then I was finished. The Jar was available for use. Things were a bit more involved in Eclipse.

Step 1: Copy the jar file to the appropriate lib directory.

Step 2: Right click on the jar file and add it to the build path.

Step 3: This is the step that annoyed me. I had to manually open the manifest file, navigate to the run-time tab, and then manually add the jar files to the classpath.

The final step was not immediately obvious to me. Hopefully this will help you, at least a bit.