Debugging Cesium applications in Eclipse

CesiumJS
1

Hi,

I am new to Cesium and fairly new to Java. I was wondering if anyone was able to build a Cesium application as a Java Executable that could be developed and debugged under Eclipse?

Thanks,

John

2

Have you checked out: https://github.com/richkadel/cesium-gwt?

It does wrap cesium for use in Java, but I don’t know if you’ll get full step-through debugging.

Let me know if that helps.

3

Thanks for writing back. I looked at gwt. The last update was 7 months ago. They support up to version 1.2.

Whatever solution is chosen it needs to be professionally supported. Since running in a web browser is not critical we are looking at Insight3d.

Thanks,

John

4

I’m curious what your actual use case is. Cesium and Insight3D are entirely different. Cesium is a Javascript 3D globe toolkit, while Insight3D appears to be a desktop application for image modeling.

As for the GWT aspect: GWT is a toolkit that allows you to write Java code and compile it to the equivalent Javascript for use in the browser. GWT includes a browser plugin that allows you to debug your “Java” code from any compatible Java debugger (including Eclipse), but that plugin is no longer supported by the major browsers. There’s an alternative debugging solution called “SuperDevMode” that allows you to debug the generated Javascript using standard browser debugging tools (Firebug, Chrome Dev Tools, etc), although I haven’t yet used that myself.

Cesium-GWT provides Java code that wraps around the Cesium Javascript API to allow it to interact properly with the GWT compiler. Cesium-GWT presumably hasn’t been updated in a few months, but since there’s been very few breaking changes since Cesium 1.0 came out, the existing code should work fine.

Anyway, I’m really confused what you’re actually looking for and wanting to do, based on those couple messages. Can you clarify what it is you’re trying to build?

Mark Erikson

5

I believe John is referring to AGI’s commercial product named Insight3D, which is a 3D globe toolkit available in .NET and Java on Windows. In many ways, Insight3D was the precursor to Cesium.

6

Ah. Hurray for global namespace clashing!

Yeah, that makes a lot more sense now. Thanks.

7

Hi Mark,

A secondary priority for us is to run on many different platforms. The browser debuggers that I looked at did not look very powerful - I could be wrong. So we are just going to focus on the Windows 7 platform.

We want to be able to visualize ground radar’s and aircraft Radar/Jammers. Essentially playing back mission data in the form of a 3D or 2D visualization.

For now we will stick to C#, Insight3D, DGL, and the Terrain Analysis Libraries. I hope that those libraries will suffice.

Regards,

John

8

Fair enough. I’m curious what makes you say browser debuggers aren’t powerful, though. Chrome Dev Tools is excellent, Firefox’s Dev Tools have improved, and Firebug is great as well. Any particular features you feel they are missing?

9

Pretty much all of the modern browsers have strong debuggers that support conditional break points; step over, into, and out functionality; call-stack tracing, scope inspection; and watch variables.

In my experience there are two issues you need to be aware:

  • Watch out for session based timeouts that depend upon a timeout or interval to maintain the session. When you are at a breakpoint and stepping through code intervals and timeouts will not trigger to keep your session alive. If this is even an issue, just have the dev environment have a more liberal timeout lifespan, let your QA or Staging environment test production session lifetimes.
  • Cache busting URL parameters can make some of the browsers forget you set breakpoints when you refresh your application. In dev environments use header based no-cacheing methods.
10

Hi Mike,

I had no idea that the browser debuggers were so good. I’m using the C# component library right now and having a very difficult time. I am having trouble finding good standalone examples.

The documentation explains each primitive, but I am having a hard time figuring how they work together. The Cesium examples seemed more appropriate for what I am trying to do.

I will try again this weekend.

Thanks,

John

11

Sounds good. Let me know how it goes.