Eclipse update site

The easiest way to install Plural is to update your existing Eclipse installation.

Plural depends on the Crystal plug-in for Eclipse. You can use Crystal's update site to install it.

http://crystalsaf.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/EclipseUpdate/

Crystal in turn depends on the PLAID annotations. The PLAID annotations plug-in can be installed from its update site:

http://plaidannotations.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/PlaidAnnotationsUpdateSite/

For installing Plural, use the following update site and follow the instructions.

http://pluralism.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/PluralEclipseUpdate/

Eclipse 3.4

1. Install Crystal following its installation instructions.
2. Select Help -> Software Updates... from the main menu.
3. Switch to the "Available Software" page.
4. Use "Add site" to add the Plural update site (if not already present). Note that Eclipse may confuse Crystal's and Plural's update sites. If this seems to happen, remove Crystal's update site before adding Plural's update site (using "Manage sites...").
5. Select "Plural Object Protocol Checker" (or the update site URL, whichever Eclipse chooses to display) in the list of update sites and check "Plural".
6. Click the "Install..." button and follow the instructions.

Eclipse should download and install Plural. It should be possible to install Crystal and Plural at the same time.

Installing the optional Fiddle Plug-in

Fiddle is a plug-in that provides UML State Diagram visualization of annotated classes. It is a part of Plural, as it depends on it, but it is not necessary to install Fiddle to use Plural. In the future, we will have more description of Fiddle and its use.

Source installation

You can use Subversion to check out the Plural module from this repository. Plural is an Eclipse plug-in project that you should add to your Eclipse workspace. (If you are checking out through Eclipse it will offer to add the project automatically to your workspace.) Create a "Run Configuration" for an "Eclipse Application" and make sure "edu.cmu.cs.plural" and "edu.cmu.cs.crystal" are among the loaded Plug-ins. Running the application will open a second Eclipse window, called the child eclipse, in which Plural is loaded.

In order to run Plural from sources, you will also have to install Crystal from its update site or its sources.

Annotations

In order to run PLURAL on your own code you will need to annotate it with a series of Java annotations we have created. See the Annotations page for more information.