The JDeveloper Plug-in requires JDeveloper 10g (9.0.5.1 - 10.1.2). See Section 1.1, "System requirements" for the basic requirements to run Jalopy.

The Plug-in comes as an executable Jar Archive (Jar) that contains a graphical setup wizard to let you easily install the software. Wizard installation is recommended and explained in detail in Section 1.3, "Wizard Installation".

If you would rather install the Plug-in manually, you have to decompress and copy the appropriate files into the different application folders. To decompress the contents of the installer Jar, you can either use the Jar tool that ships with your Java distribution or any other software that can handle the ZIP compression format (e.g. 7Zip or WinZip).

If you're upgrading from a prior version and want to keep your settings, first copy or rename the current Jalopy settings directory to match the version number of the new release. For instance, if your current settings directory is "C:\Documents and Settings\John Doo\.jalopy\1.0.4" and you're about to install Jalopy 1.8, either copy the directory contents or rename it to "C:\Documents and Settings\.jalopy\John Doo\1.8". Wizard installation can perform this step automatically.

Make sure JDeveloper is not running and remove any prior Jalopy Jar files from your JDeveloper extension folder. The JDeveloper extension folder is located under the root directory of your JDeveloper installation, e.g. "C:\Program Files\JDeveloper\jdev\lib\ext". Remove all Jar files starting with "jalopy-".

Now decompress the contents of the installer Jar file into a temporary directory and copy the two Jar files "jalopy-1.8.jar" and "jalopy-jdev-1.8.jar" from the temporary directory into the JDeveloper extension folder.

The software adds a new menu item into the context popup menu of the Navigator:

Figure 9.1. JDeveloper Navigator context menu

The software adds a new menu item into the context popup menu of Java code editors:

Figure 9.2. JDeveloper Editor context menu

The Jalopy preferences dialog to configure your Jalopy code convention preferences can be invoked from the Menu Bar and is reachable through the Tools->Jalopy Preferences... menu item.

Please note that Jalopy does not store its preferences within the IDE configuration files, but uses its own provisions to store preferences in order to allow the resuse of Jalopy preferences between different IDEs. You find the Jalopy settings system and preferences dialog described in detail in Chapter 2, Configuration.

Jalopy displays all runtime messages in its own log window. Messages are shown in a tree control, with each branch containing the messages for a specific file, and individual messages displayed as leafs. File messages displays the number of leaves and the warning and error count.

The message types are differentiated with icons and by color: Errors are red with an error icon, warnings are shown in blue and display a warning sign, informational messages are black and carry a file icon and debugging messages are black and prepended by a bug icon.

Figure 9.3. Jalopy Log Window

Clicking on a file name will open that file, clicking on a message that contains location information will open the file containing the message and move the caret to the nomimated location.

Figure 9.4. Jalopy Log Window Context Menu

The window provides a context menu with some useful actions.

The software adds a new category to the JDeveloper accelerator preferences:

Figure 9.5. JDeveloper accelerator preferences

Please note that the accelerators are global and the "Format" action considers the current application context, i.e. if the editor view has the focus, the accelerator triggers the formatting of the active editor. If the System Navigator contains the focus, the accelerator trigges the formatting of all selected nodes in the Navigator.