Doubts related to setup

[conne...@gmail.com]

Hi,

I want to start contributing to the project. I want to first have a bit of understanding of the project source code and hence i checked it out as mentioned on http://www.joeffice.org/ . Now, when I build the project, build is successful and project runs fine. 

I want to have understanding of the source code, for that i thought debugging is the best option. I have never used NetBeans, this is my first time. I have used eclipse and STS. I tried importing this project to eclipse but it does not recognize it as a project(probably as .project file is not there). I have a lots of question in my mind right now.

As much as i understand, when i run the project in netbeans, it runs ant using build.xml present in Joeffice and it takes org.joeffice.tools.FilterJXList.main() as the entry point of the application. Please correct me if I am wrong. Now, if i put a break point in main method inside this class, i see below on the console :

Listening on 52518

Not able to submit breakpoint LineBreakpoint FilterJXList.java : 78, reason: No source root found for URL 'file:/C:/Joeffice-WorkSapce/joeffice/tools/src/org/joeffice/tools/FilterJXList.java'. Verify the setup of project sources.

Invalid LineBreakpoint FilterJXList.java : 78

User program running

What is wrong here? 

Also under files tab in netbeans, i see many other projects inside Joeffice like Database, Desktop, Drawing. How are they organized? How do these component form the complete project? How do they get loaded via ant script?

Please let me know, if you have a better approach for understanding the code base :). Also if somebody can walk me through the dry run of the project(right after running the project, what happens).

Thanks for help,

Aj

[Anthony Goubard]

Hi Aj,

 Tools is not part of Joeffice. It's just a directory for testing purpose. There is specific Ant target in build.xml to compile and run these classes. I haven't added a debug target.

 Yes, Joeffice is based the NetBeans Platform so it works better with the NetBeans IDE. 

 It's a bit like maven, you have a parent module and sub modules. Parent module is Joeffice and contains no code, then there is Desktop which contains the common code and the other modules.

 Joeffice is the complete project.

 I think that there is a task that start the application. It starts a org.netbeans.Main class from core.jar (a netbeans jar file). Each module has it's own jar file in Joeffice that is initialized at start-up.

 You can find a lot of documentation about the netbeans platform on internet. I would invite you to start here to understand how Joeffice is build / runs.

https://edu.netbeans.org/contrib/slides/netbeans-platform/

Anthony