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Tutorial

Developing Penlets in Eclipse

Tutorial by Robert Hanson

In this tutorial we are going to explain how to set up Eclipse to develop penlets. At the time of this writing only the JavaOne SDK is available, so the tutorial will be based on that. The good news is that this is relatively easy to do, so we should have you up and running in a ten minutes.

Whoa! What about the PreRelease-SDK? If you are using the PreRelease-SDK, it ships with an Ant build script that will automate all of this for you. You can find the instructions in the README-Eclipse.txt file that ships with the SDK. If on the other hand you rather run through the steps manually, this tutorial still applies.

In Eclipse you start by creating a new project, and creating the following directory structure. The /src/images directory is option. It is only needed if you plan on displaying images on your pen's display, which we cover in a separate tutorial.

/src/java
/src/images
/res

in the /res directory you will need to create two text files, config.txt and menu.txt . You should consult the documentation that came with the SDK for the contents of these files, but if you are in a rush the typical case is that config.txt is left empty, and menu.txt looks something like the example below. The menu.txt file is used to configure how your penlet appears in the pen's menu options. This one is from our Image Demo application.

name=Image Demo
type=APP
appclassname=com.penlets.graphics.ImageDemo
sound=

Next, at the root of the project, you will need to add a build.properties file. This file contains information needed to build the JAR file for the penlet being developed. Again, consult the SDK documentation for the details, but here is the one used by our Image Demo application.

# Build Properties for the Application
app.name=Image Demo
app.version=1.0.0
app.penlet.class=com.penlets.graphics.ImageDemo
app.vendor.code=Penlets
app.vendor.name=Penlets.com

The last file to add to the project is the build.xml file, which is placed at the root of the project. This is an Ant build file that is generated when you create a penlet project in NetBeans, using the plugin provided with the SDK. You can use this build file-as is with one exception, you must set the PENLETSDK_HOME to the penletsdk directory under where you unzipped the SDK distribution. The SDK contains a much larger Ant script, containing all of the build targets, that this one will include.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<project name="My Project Name" basedir="." default="dist">
    <property name="PENLETSDK_HOME" location="C:\LivescribeJavaOneSDK-1.0\penletsdk"/>
    <property name="common.builddir" value="${PENLETSDK_HOME}/build" />
    <property name="java.src.dir" value="src/java"/>
    <import file="${common.builddir}/build-common.xml" optional="false" />
</project>

The last step is to configure the build path for your project. When you open up your build path dialog in Eclipse, under the Libraries tab you will undoubtedly see your Java SDK, typically for Java 5 or Java 6. Remove this! This might seem wrong, especially for a Java project, but this is the right thing to do in this case. The Pulse Pen only supported a micro Java SDK, and the LiveScribe SDK already contains all of these standard Java classes.

With your Java SDK removed, you need to add the Livescribe SDK classes. This is located in the unzipped SDK, under /penletsdk/lib/classes.zip . It should look like what you see below.

That is it. In Eclipse when you right-click the build.xml file and select Ant Build... you will see all of the available targets. This will allow you to build, package, deploy and undeploy your application from the pen.

Happy coding!

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