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Away3D can be installed either from the latest releases on the Away3D downloads page or from the SVN repository located on the googlecode site.

I’ve chosen the second method so that I can easily and regularly update the source to be up to date with the latest fixes and enhancements. I’m using the same technique that I showed downloading and compiling Papervision3D using SVN in eclipse. Since I use eclipse as my development environment (with the Flex Builder 3 plugin), I like to keep all my sources together in the same environment and the SVN plugin for eclipse works very well.

In eclipse select Import… from the File menu. You’ll see the following window appear.

Under the SVN item, select Projects from SVN and click Next. You’ll then be requested to enter details for the SVN repository.

For the URL enter http://away3d.googlecode.com/svn. Leave the user details empty - we’ll use anonymous access to obtain the source. Click Next to continue. Eclipse will examine the SVN repository and show the repository structure.

We’ll download everything from the trunk (which includes the source, docs and examples), so select trunk and click on Finish. You’ll then be asked how you want to check out the source.

We want to create a Flex Library project so select Check out as a project configured using the New Project Wizard.

Under Flex Builder, choose Flex Library Project and click Next.

Enter Away3D as the Project name (or any other name you’d like…) then select Next to configure the source directory.

Click next to src under Classes to include in the library. The Main source folder should show src, and the Output folder should show bin. Sometimes selecting the source folder here doesn’t always work and we’ll have to explicitly give the source folder again after the project has been created, as shown below.

You should now see in the Flex Navigator in eclipse a new project called Away3D with the latest revision number next to it. If you have the error nothing was specified to be included in the library shown in the Problems view, then you need to re-specify the source directory as I mentioned above. Simply right-click on the Away3D project and select Properties.

Under Flex Library Build Path, once again click next to src in the Classes to include in library box. After clicking OK you should see that eclipse is compiling the sources.

The final result is the Away3D.swc Flex library, located in the bin directory, that can be used with other Away3D projects that you create afterwards. Similarly, with eclipse, you can compile Away3D projects by linking directly to this project. Personally I prefer the second method simply because it makes developing and debugging easier as you can directly look at the source for a particular Away3D class.

Hope this is of some use. I’ll be taking a look, as I did with Papervision3D, at producing a few simple examples just to get a feel of the library… more soon I hope!

In this post I aim to show you how to download the Papervision3D v2.0 (codenamed Great White) sources from their Subversion repository within Eclipse and compile them as an Actionscript 3 library.

For this I’m assuming that you have the Flex Builder 3 plugin installed (see a previous post on using this plugin with Eclipse 3.4) and, if you need to, read my last post on installing the SVN plugin (Subversive) in eclipse. Another source of information can be found on the Papervision3D FAQ.

In Eclipse, select Import… from the File menu item

From the popup that appears, select Projects from SVN in the SVN node of the tree - thanks to the Subversive Eclipse plugin - and click Next.

You’ll then be requested information on the SVN repository. We need to create a new one for the the Papervision3D source so select the Create a new repository location radio button and click Next.

In the following window we need to enter information about the Papervision3D respository location. Enter http://papervision3d.googlecode.com/svn/ in the text field next to the URL: label and click Next. Note that the URL given on the Papervision3D FAQ is http://papervision3d.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/. Eclipse automatically searches for the trunk directory, as you can see if you click on the Advanced settings tab, so we don’t need to give it here.

Eclipse then searches for the repository and provides a listing of available directories. You can browse through the trunk branches and you’ll see that there is the Great White branch as well as the previous version of Papervision3D (v1.5 ?) shown here for Actionscript 3. Select GreatWhite and click on Finish.

Eclipse starts to scan the repository and then requests how you would like to check out the project. Select Check out as a project configured using the New Project Wizard and click on Finish.

In the New Project wizard select Flex Library Project from the Flex Builder tree node and click Next.

Enter the name of the project you’d like to create - for example Papervision3D as I show below and click Next to set up the main source directory.

Enter src in the field next to the Main source folder label and select the radio button next to src under Classes to include in the library then click on Finish.

Eclipse will then start to check out the Great White branch from the Papervision3D repository and place them in a new project which can take several minutes. You should then see the new project in the Flex Navigator.

If, like me, you see the error message nothing was specified to be included in the library, then simply right-click on the project, select Properties and select Flex Library Build Path from the menu and click on the check box next to src under Classes to include in the library and click on OK.

You’ll see at the bottom right of the Eclipse window that it starts to compile the sources and when its finished if you open up the bin directory of the project in the Navigator you’ll see a newly created libary file called Papervision3D.swc that you can use in your Papervision3D projects (or otherwise link your other projects to the Papervision3D one when you configure them).

Also included in the import are some examples of using Papervision3D v2.0. These are useful to get started on Papervision3D projects. Similarly useful is to perform the same procedure as above and check out the previous version of Papervision3D (check out from a different branch from the repository as shown above when importing an SVN project). The API has changed quite a lot, but not completely. There are a lot of useful examples showing the different features. The source code is also well documented and its useful exploring the different Actionscript classes.

Anyway, I hope to provide some simple, concrete examples of using Papervision3D in the near future. In the meantime I hope this has provided a useful step in obtaining the source code using SVN in Eclipse (*) and please let me know if there’s anything missing.

(* by the way, I presume the same steps in installing SVN and obtaining the Papervision3D source code can be performed directly within the Flex Builder 3 application since it uses the Eclipse architecture - it’d be useful to know if you’ve tried it)

To download Papervision3D v2.0 (Great White) we need to have Subversion (SVN) installed (see the pv3d wiki). I’ve seen a number of posts on the web doing this using a separate SVN client (for example using TortoiseSVN in Windows, (shown here in a YouTube video tutorial), and svnX for the Mac). However, I’m a fan of Eclipse and have not come across a CVS client that works as well as that which is included with Eclipse so wanted to see how well SVN plugin compared. Plus with Eclipse being multi-platform I can move from Mac to Linux to Windows and have exactly the same interface for all of them - I guess my motto is be lazy because I’d really rather not repeat the same tasks using different applications wherever I go. What’s more, I use the Flex Builder 3 plugin for Eclipse and, as with my other projects, like to have the version control integrated into my development environment. For SVN, we need to install the Subversive plugin for eclipse.

To integrate SVN into eclipse I simply followed the instructions given on the Subversive download page. Before using the Subversive plugin we need to however download the SVN Connectors. The following illustrates how to do this using Eclipse Software Updates.

In Eclipse, selected the Help menu item, then Software updates… Click on the Available Software tab.

We first need to install the SVN Connectors that are available from polarion.com, from where the Subversive plugin originates. Click on Add Site… and type the following address : http://www.polarion.org/projects/subversive/download/eclipse/2.0/update-site/

When you click OK you’ll see a new list of components available for installation.

Click on the check box next to the polarion to select all the components and then click on Install…

NOTE : If you’re using a Mac you must deselect both the JavaHL Win32 Binaries otherwise there are unresolved conflicts when it comes to installing the Subversive plugin.

You should now be presented with a summary of all the components to be installed.

Click Next and accept the terms of the license agreement. The components are then downloaded and installed. You’ll then be asked whether you want to restart eclipse - its probably a good idea to do this.

When Eclipse restarts we need to go through the same procedure to install the Subversive plugin. As before, select Software Updates… from the Help menu item and then click on Add Site… Now type the address of the Eclipse Subversive update site : http://download.eclipse.org/technology/subversive/0.7/update-site/

Click OK and select the newly proposed components for Subversion :

Click on Install… and you’ll get a summary of the new components to install.

Click Next and agree to the terms of the license agreement and Eclipse will start to download and install the Subversion plugin. As for the SVN Connectors, restart Eclipse when prompted.

And that’s it ! You should now have SVN fully working within Eclipse. Just to check, if you select
Import… from the File menu item you should have the possibility of importing a project from SVN.

So now that we have Subversive up and running in Eclipse, we can now move onto the main objective of installing Papervision3D v2.0 (Great White) from its SVN repository.