I’ve read a lot of the Ignition SDK Programmer’s Guide, a few times, and I’m still having trouble getting started. If you haven’t guessed yet I’m not a professional software architect or software developer, I’m a not-so-typical automation engineer. As far as I can tell I’ve installed all the required software per the instructions (Git, Maven, Netbeans 12.4 for my IDE…changed the default JDK from 16 to 11 etc.) and its all working. Following the Ignition vision-component example I thought I could use this as a template and expected to find some Java classes that I would edit in the Swing design tab but only source tabs exist. How to I start? I cloned ignition-module-tools from GitHub but don’t know what to do with them. Most of you clever folks know this inside and out…is there some kind of template or step-by-step guide for newbies? Any help would be appreciated.
Internally, and the new Perspective example uses Gradle, but you can use whatever build system you want. They're just dependencies and the module file is just a zip file in the end. The Maven plugin we published still works just fine.
Would that I had all the time in the world
A few people internally have been kicking around the same idea (for a while...) - we're doing internal restructuring of our build process right now, but once that's done there might be bandwidth for something in this space.
While there's a lot of truth to that, "not A -> B" does not make "A -> not B". There are many who can both do and teach. Paul does a lot of effective teaching around here.
Sure. He’s taught me plenty as well as you. I am really grateful for you guys. Learning ignition was such a blessing for me. I just landed an amazing job. Like just this morning…
I was speaking more to that there are likely more profitable pursuits. He could be doing with his found time. lol
Hello everyone, thank you for the tips and insights
So one more question…
Regardless of the IDE I’m using, do you know of an IDE that creates a WYSIWYG-type design window when you create a class that extends a (correction)AbstractVisionComponent? I’m assuming the Ignition programmers use something like that to create components.
Thanks again and have a great weekend!
There are also many who can do, and cannot teach (as you implied). Teaching is a skill in its own right. Just want to give a shout out to @PGriffith@Kevin.Herron and you @pturmel for being great teachers on this forum. I've been using Ignition for a little over two years now and you all have been vital in upping my (and I'm sure many others) skills.
Eclipse IDE 2021-6 (download site) has a bi-directional UI designer plug in, WindowBuilder Pro [download site]. It creates a WYSIWYG-type design tab from Swing classes. Here’s a screen grab of the SDK vision-component example ChartComponent.java (I modified it).
It isn’t perfect and you still have to code by hand (like Kevin said) but it gives you something to look at.
Regarding my question about a step-by-step guide, well, I cloned the vision-component example and just started modifying to see if I could do something. Coding for the chart in the example was incomplete so I finished it by creating the bean info class from the hello-world component, Imported the module and added the components to my project.
Hopefully this can help some other people new to component development.
