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EiffelStudio |
5 A LOOK AT THE PROJECT DIRECTORY |
Before we proceed with the facilities of the environment, let's take a look at the way EiffelStudio organizes project files.
With EiffelStudio, you build projects. Most projects yield an executable system, although you can also build a project just to define a library for use by such systems.
Every session is relative to a project; you can start a new project from within EiffelStudio by going to the File --> New Project menu, but please don't select that menu entry now as we have many more things to do with our current project first.
Every project has a project directory which will contain the files generated and managed by EiffelStudio. The project directory may also host some of the source files containing your Eiffel classes, the ECF (eiffel configurationl file), and external software written in other languages, but that is not required; the source files and ecf may reside anywhere. Some users, in fact, like to put nothing else than the EiffelStudio-generated files in the project directory; this separates user-managed and system-managed files, and can facilitate configuration management, backups and porting.
In this simple Tour, things have been set up so that all the files of interest, source texts as well as generated ones, will appear in the project directory YOURDIR (either $ISE_EIFFEL\examples\studio\tour or the copy that you have made). Go to that project directory using the Windows explorer or a cd command, and look at its contents (using ls on Unix/Linux):
The contents of this YOURDIR directory include the following:
Later on, we will see that EiffelStudio may generate three more subdirectories of the project directory: Diagrams , if you produce graphical system diagrams; Documentation , if you request system documentation, for example HTML; and Metrics , if you perform measurements on your system. Other than these directories, EIFGENs EiffelStudio will not touch anything in the project directory, so you may safely add and change whatever files and subdirectories you like.
You seldom need to look into EIFGENs , although you should know that it's there. Right now if you check the contents of the project directory YOURDIR (using the Windows Explorer on Windows, the ls command on Unix, or some equivalent mechanism), you will see that EIFGENs has been created, itself with a subdirectory called classic which is the name of the target and which has some subdirectories, including W_Code which contains the generated code ( W for "Workbench" -- we'll see the reason later). Feel free to browse through it if you like, but don't change anything.
By the way, we are now done with any platform-specific instructions. Everything in the rest of this Tour, other than the graphical look-and-feel, will work the same across all EiffelStudio platforms.
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