[Bluej-discuss] BlueJ and the Eclipse compiler

[Davin McCall]

Steve,

A while ago I experimented with using the Eclipse compiler from within BlueJ, mainly because (at the time) the standard javac was noticeably slow on the first compile. I got it working to a degree (it would compile things, but I never bothered to correctly parse the error messages, which is a lot more work).

That is the real problem: you can certainly set the compiler type to "javac" (as opposed to "internal") and then set "bluej.compiler.executable" (which might be an undocumented option) to the name of the eclipse compiler executable, and it will probably compile stuff successfully, however any error messages are unlikely to be displayed correctly.

Also, even if you do get the eclipse compiler to work, you don't avoid the need for the JDK because BlueJ still uses it (specifically the "tools.jar" file) for Javadoc (though it can run that externally as well) and for JDI, the debugger interface, which is an unavoidable dependency.

Davin


On Sat, 21 Jul 2007 18:25:02 -0700
"Stephen Gilbert" <sgilbert at occ.cccd.edu> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I noticed in bluej.defs I could change the compiler to use jikes. I wonder
> if it would be possible to
> change bluej to use the standalone Eclipse compiler? In my classes, students
> start at the
> command line, move to BlueJ and end up with Eclipse. I'm experimenting with
> moving to
> the Eclipse command-line compiler to avoid students having to download the
> JDK. The
> compiler is about 1.2 MB. It also seems to give better error messages for
> beginners than
> Javac does. Would this make it possible for BlueJ and/or Greenfoot to be
> used without an
> installed JDK?
> 
> -- Steve
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> Stephen Gilbert, Orange Coast College Computer Science
> http://csjava.occ.cccd.edu/~gilberts
> StephenGilbert at gmail.com
>