Table of Contents
This chapter will guide you through setting up the Eclipse platform, a universal IDE with excellent Java development support. It is not absolutely necessary that you use Eclipse to understand this tutorial. It makes using it, however, much more convenient.
You are required to copy numerous files to a local directory on your computer. In this and the following section, we show you exactly what you need to copy, where you should copy to and how to configure your development environment to be able to compile and run the tutorial examples. We do this in a step-by-step fashion. If you follow these instructions exactly, we hope that you will avoid any complications whatsoever.
The First Steps Tutorial is composed of the following artifacts:
Tensegrity Framework Jar Files (Java Archives)
Tensegrity Framework Java Documentation (Javadoc)
Tensegrity First Steps Tutorial (This document)
Tensegrity First Steps Source Code (Zipfile)
While working with the Tensegrity Graph Framework you will notice that a special care has been taken to remove from the core functionalities any dependency on the windowing toolkit being used. The Tensegrity Graph Framework currently provides a wide range of AWT/Swing-based GUI components supporting its core functionalities, but also a set of GUI components based upon SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit) for integration with the Eclipse platform. At this point in time all the following tutorials except the “Skeleton”-based one are illustrated by both AWT/Swing-based and SWT-based samples.
© 2004, 2005 Tensegrity Software GmbH