Developing with Eclipse

This page is part of the Developer Section. It describes how to get the BaseX sources compiled and running on your system.

Another article in the documentation describes how to use BaseX as a query processor in Eclipse.

Prerequisites

BaseX is developed with the Eclipse environment (other IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA can be used as well). The Eclipse IDE for Java Developers includes the EGit plugin (for Git) and the m2e plugin (for Maven).

Other Eclipse plugins we use are:

Name	Description	Update URL
eclipse-cs	Enforces Checkstyle coding standards.	http://eclipse-cs.sf.net/update/
FindBugs	Analyze project at byte code level	http://findbugs.cs.umd.edu/eclipse
Core Tools	Find dead (unreferenced) code.	http://eclipse.org/eclipse/platform-core/updates
EclEmma	Code coverage tool.	http://update.eclemma.org/

Check Out

Our Git Tutorial explains how BaseX can be checked out from the GitHub Repository and embedded in Eclipse with EGit. The article also demonstrates how git can be used on command-line.

The basex repository contains the following sub-directories:

1. basex-core is the main project
2. basex-api contains the BaseX APIs (XML:DB, bindings in other languages) and HTTP Services (REST, RESTXQ, WebDAV)
3. basex-examples includes some examples code for BaseX
4. basex-tests contains several unit and stress tests

If the problems view shows a list of warning, you may need to switch to Java 6 (Windows → Preferences → Installed JREs).

With the Maven plugin from Eclipse, it sometimes requires several attempts to get all dependencies updated. This loop can be avoided if the sources are precompiled via Maven on command-line.

Start in Eclipse

1. Press Run → Run…
2. Create a new "Java Application" launch configuration
3. Select "basex" as "Project"
4. Choose a "Main class" (e.g., org.basex.BaseXGUI for the graphical user interface)
5. Launch the project via Run

Alternative

You may as well use the standalone version of Maven to compile and run the project, use other IDEs such as IntelliJ IDEA.