Developing ij-Plugins using IntelliJ IDEA

The care is taken in all ij-plugins sources not to be dependent on any particular IDE or development system. Most of the code can be build using Apache Ant from a command line (though Ant build scripts are generated using NetBeans). You can practically use any IDE of you choice.

This guide describes how to setup development using IntelliJ IDEA. This works in both, the free Community Edition version and the paid Ultimate Edition.

For simplicity the guide assumes that you want to work only with a single plugin module, in this case the ij-plugins_toolkit. Here are the steps:

Below are detailed the steps, based in IDEA v.10.0.2, they assume that you already downloaded and installed Java SDK and IntelliJ IDEA.

If you are an experienced IDEA user, you may skip to the last step. It describes how to Run/Debug Configuration using setup-plugins target in the Ant's build script.

  1. Checkout selected ij-Plugins module from SVN repository.
  2. Create IDEA project for the ij-plugins module.
  3. Configure project sources and libraries
  4. Create Run/Debug Configuration for ImageJ that automatically creates and copies plugin JARSs.