Subject: Micro-HOWTO: JacORB and IBM Visual Age for Java
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 11:13:49 +0200
From: Frank Bergmann <frank@fraber.de>
To: JacORB Mailing List <jacorb-developer@lists.spline.inf.fu-berlin.de>
CC: Gerald Brose <brose@inf.fu-berlin.de>

Micro-HOWTO
JacORB and IBM Visual Age for Java

Goal of this Micro-HOWTO is to integrate JacORB into VAJ
so that you can use the integrated development environment
(IDE) to compile IDLs.

1. Get yourself a VAJ version: The "Professional Beta 2.0"
and a "Professional Demo" have been around on several
shareware CDs. There's also a free Beta for Linux, but I
didn't check it out yet.

2. Import the JacORB source into VAJ: The import is
straight, except for changing the SWING locations to
com.sun.java.swing.*.

3. Create your sample project, "JacORB Example" for
instance.

4. Open the IDL view to your new project: Rightclick your
"JacORB Example" and choose: "Open To"/IDL.

5. Rightclick into the IDLs subwindow, choose "Add IDL
Group" and create for example the "userman" IDL group.

6. Rightclick the "userman" IDL group, choose: "Add IDL
Object" and create for example "user_manager".

7. Insert some IDL code into the "IDL Source" subwindow,
for example:

module user_manager {
  struct KeyValue {
        string  key;
        string  value;
  };
  typedef sequence <KeyValue> KVList;
  interface UserManager {
    void createUser(in string userName);
    void setUserVars(in string userName, in KVList args);
    KVList getUserVars(in string userName);
    StringList getUserList();
  };
};

Press "Ctrl-S" to save the code.

8. Set the IDL compiler parameter: Rightclick the
"userman" IDL group and choose: "Change Compiler Options".
Set "Other Compiler" to "c:\home\java\jacorb\bin\idl" for
example and the "Compile Options" to "-p fraber.userman"
to create code located in "fraber.userman.XXX" packages.

9. Compile the IDL by rightclicking the "userman" IDL
groups and choosing "Generate Java"/"All Objects". VAJ
starts the compiler and imports the generated files into
the project.

10. My VAJ help system has some problems so that I didn't
find the help for this feature. Please tell me, if you
found a help page: mailto:frank@fraber.de

11. I encountered a problem with VAJ: After doing a
version rollback on the "JacORB Examples" project, all my
IDL code disappeared. It seems that the IDL code didnīt
get saved together with the project. Workaround: Make sure
you version your IDL code.

A sample ".dat" file with my "JacORB Example" project can
be found at: http://www.fraber.de/jacorb/

I hope that helps. I love working with VAJ, but make sure
you've got >96M (I'm not exaggerating).

Best regards,
Frank

mailto:frank@fraber.de, http://www.fraber.de/