Prerequisites

The Flow4J Plug-in requires:

  • JDK 1.4.x
  • Eclipse 2.1.x, 3.0.x or 3.1.x
  • The successful installation of Plug-ins from the Eclipse-GEF framework (GEF and Draw2D)

The Graphical Editing Framework (GEF) allows developers to take an existing application model and easily create a rich graphical editor.

The easiest way to install GEF is

  • download the GEF-SDK from the beforementioned link
  • extract the SDK archive in your ECLIPSE_HOME directory. This installs some features in your ECLIPSE_HOME/features directory and the required Plug-ins in the ECLIPSE_HOME/plugins directory.

Flow4J Installation

Using the Eclipse Update Manager

  • change to the "Update/Install" perspective
  • open the context menu in the "Feature Updates" view
  • select "New-Site Bookmark...
  • make the following settings:
  • quit Eclipse if its still running
  • restart Eclipse

An important setting has to be done in the Eclipse preferences Install/Update section: "Valid updates" has to be set to compatible . Otherwise major release changes won't be updated.

If you are behind a firewall, then set the proxy settings in the Workbench preferences - Install/Update panel.

Note:

If you use a proxy that caches down loaded data, then you will get stuck at you currently installed version because the eclipse update manager will always get the cached version information.

In this case adjust the update URL in the Update/Install perspective

from

http://flow4jeclipse.sf.net/update

to

http://flow4jeclipse.sf.net/VERSION like:

http://flow4jeclipse.sf.net/0.6.0

Manual Installation

  • download the Flow4J Plug-in from the SourceForge download page
  • extract the the downloaded archive into the ECLIPSE_HOME directory. It will place a net.orthanc.flow4j_x.x.x folder in the plugins and features folders
  • quit Eclipse if its still running
  • restart Eclipse

Now verify that Flow is correctly installed:

Help menu - About Eclipse Platform - Plug-in Details

Here the Plug-in with name "Flow4J" and id "net.orthanc.flow4j" should appear.