In this tutorial we will show how to create a Aranea Message Project with Eclipse. The message project will contain your message definitions and it will be configured with a builder to generate message classes for Java and Eiffel on the fly.

Prerequisite

• You need to be familiar with Eclipse, Java, and Eclipse Plugin Development.
• Have the Aranea Development Environment installed see Aranea Java Development Environment Setup Guide

Create a message project

Once you have the Aranea Development Environment installed creating a new Aranea message project is really simple:

• Go to File > New Project
• Select the Aranea - Aranea Message Project wizard
• Next>
• Type in a project name pingpong for example
• Finish

A new project will be created in your workspace and some weird characters are printed to the console:

The project contains a aranea message model file: src/model.dsl. This is the only file you have to edit in this project. Everytime the model file changes (is saved) the aranea message classes are builded for you automatically. The stuff written to the console is telling you if the generation works. If you see a BUILD SUCCESSFUL everything is fine and the aranea message classes for Java have been generated into the src-gen source folder and compiled. The Eiffel classes have been generated into the src-gen-eiffel-aranea folder.

That's it. The message project is a normal OSGI bundel, other bundles can depend on your message bundle and use the generated Java messsage classes.