Smoothing out Java development within the Designer

Module Development
1

Speaking of joint Module and Project development, my typical iteration of construction process consists of

  • running the Designer,
  • detecting an error in the Java code by testing out a part of the application within the Designer,
  • fixing the problem through Eclipse, re-building and re-deploying the module using Ant,
  • restarting the Designer,
  • resuming to the point within the Designer I was working on,
  • and testing if the changes work

which will take a while each time, all actual work excluded. And this is often between 20 and 200 times a day.

Most of the time is spent restarting and resuming Ignition Designer session and the only reason seems to be reloading the module (the one that contains my Java code) jar files into the Designer.

For comparison, it is quite slow compared to Eclipse/Java/Tomcat webapp development, where everything is pretty much integrated into the IDE.

Any ideas how to improve the situation?

Thanks!

2

I’ve been doing development in both the gateway and the designer.

For the designer, I came up with a few shortcuts to speed along the process.

  1. I am using an external library in my software. Instead of including all these jars in my module, I created a separate module with just these jars, and then depended on that module for my main code. This sped up how fast Ignition loaded my module significantly.

  2. I added an option to the ant build script, which is BuildAndInstallAndLaunchDesigner. (I know, the name could be better :slight_smile: ) The code is:

<target name="BuildAndInstallModuleAndLaunchDesigner" depends="BuildAndInstallModule"> <exec executable="javaws"> <arg value="http://localhost:8088/main/system/launch/designer/designer.jnlp"/> </exec> </target>

My build script is based off of the earlier ModuleSDK build script, so the “depends” above might need to be slightly different for you, but that’s the basic idea.

I talked to the IA guys, and right now there’s no way to bypass the login step, or automatically select a project. However, what I wrote above may at least cut out a bit of the down time :slight_smile:

Also, after I got most of the parts in the designer good and started focusing on the gateway, I was able to rebuild and install the module, and leave a designer open.

There’s one other option: you could set your version number of your module to increase with every build. If you do that, the designer will automatically prompt you to update when you install the new build. It still requires you to log in again / select a project, so it’s a toss up between this and the build script modification above.

Good luck!