CODEWITHSUNDEEP
eclipsescaladebuggingidesbt
user743436
user743436

Reputation: 324

Is there any video tutorial for setting up Scala IDE with usage of both external libraries and debugging your own source code projects dependencies?

Is there any video tutorial for setting up Scala IDE with usage of both external libraries and debugging your own source code projects dependencies ?

I think that four of the most fundamental things (which should be fairly easy to get started with) when learning a new language and development environment are to do the following things from within a good IDE (e.g. Scala IDE / Eclipse):

(1) Learn how to reuse third part libraries (the binary versions, when there is no need for debugging)

(2) Learn how to set up your development environment with multiple source code projects/libraries, and if you start the application (e.g. a main method) in one of the projects and when it is using code in another project, then you should be able to debug into the source code of the other project/library.

(3) Learn how to distribute/package the different projects into separate libraries, and make them deployable and reusable in a context when binary usage is enough (i.e. as in item 1 above when you want to reuse third part libraries and do not need to debug the source code of the libraries)

(4) Learn how to deploy the application in such a way that you can start its execution normally i.e. from outside of any IDE (but using the artifacts, e.g. jar files, which you have created with the IDE)

If the kind of video tutorial I am looking for still not exists then I would like to encourage someone with the needed skills to create it and make it easy to find, e.g. try to make it published here: http://scala-ide.org/docs/videos.html (but currently there is only a Scala debugger video tutorial without teaching how to manage multiple projects).

Of course, it would also be desirable to publish a link to it from within this stackoverflow page which likely will be found by other frustrated developers looking for a good video tutorial about how to reuse and debug multiple projects.

These things I mentioned above should really not have to be as complicated as it is to get started with, which is proven by the development environment Visual Studio in combination with package managet NuGet. I consider the steep lurning curve of learning and fiddling with the Scala development environment setup as a problem which I think will cause people to give up and instead prefer to use .NET development (C# and Visual Studio with NuGet).

This is not because the language C# is better than Scala but because it so much easier to learn to use Visual Studio and NuGet (visually and intutitive, with right-clicking) than it is to learn how to use compatible versions of Eclipse, Scala, SBT, Ivy and how to manually configure build.sbt, build.scala, build.properties, and using compatible versions and percentage characters "%%" or "%" in sbt files, and scalaVersion etc.

As I mentioned, all these things are more easy to learn with Visual Studio and NuGet, but the learning curve for Scala development is really annoying, and when you have spent a couple of hours with SBT documentation and Googling for errors about "unresolved dependencies" it is tempting to give up on Scala, which I think is sad, since the Scala language itself indeed has potential.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 144

Answers (1)

Iulian Dragos
Iulian Dragos

Reputation: 5712

I agree that getting started isn't as easy as it should be. Have you tried Activator? It makes it easy to create your first project and explains each step. It also has a way to export your project to Eclipse or IntelliJ. It has an sbt template, but I don't know if there is a multi-project setup.

Here's a few pointers that might help others in the same situation, until a more complex video is produced:

  • setting up jar dependencies (or inter-project dependencies) in Scala IDE is identical to how you'd do it for Java projects. (for example, see this question)
  • debugging projects that depend on each other requires no special action (if the step above worked fine)
  • deploying and execution outside of the IDE is best done using sbt (see this question).

Hope this helps.

Upvotes: 1

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