History of the Creation¶

Since I decided to use VS Code for this project, I had to bang my head against the wall for a while to get everything working. Note to self: never again.

Image 1: Spoiler alert. This image is the result of the multi-hour battle that I started when choosing VS Code over IntelliJ.

Install and init¶

Commands that were run to set up the project were:

# Install SDKMAN!
curl -s "https://get.sdkman.io" | bash
source "$HOME/.sdkman/bin/sdkman-init.sh"

# Install Java 25 and Maven
sdk install java 25.0.2-tem
sdk install maven

# Create a new Maven project
cd ~/Code/$USER
mvn archetype:generate \
  -DgroupId=fi.jyu.ohj2.sourander.ankea \
  -DartifactId=ankea \
  -DarchetypeArtifactId=maven-archetype-quickstart \
  -DarchetypeVersion=1.5 \
  -DinteractiveMode=false
cd ankea

One could also utilize the interactive mode, like guided in tutorialspoints Maven - Project Templates.

POM settings¶

For VS Code, install the Extension Pack for Java by Microsoft.

After this, the pom.xml was edited to add JavaFX dependencies and set the Java version to 25. I copy-pasted most of the JavaFX dependencies from the IDEA project. I suppose I could've used some javafx-fxml-template to do scaffolding, but... yeah. This works too.

VS Code Settings¶

For this, I referred to Java Development Setup, SDKMAN, Gradle, VS Code guide by Mikyan.

Justfile¶

I had some problems with the Run and Debug buttons in VS Codes code editor view. They appeared only in the preset App.java file, but not in the test file nor my actual App.java file.

CLI is king anyways, so I created a Justfile to run the app and tests with just just run and just test commands.

Java to Docs¶

I used Dokka CLI to generate documentation from the Java code. I tried getting the Maven plugin to work, but had to give up after a while. CLI worked fine, although I cannot find proper documentation for the GFM plugin. Having that said, the site states that it is experimental, so I guess that is to be expected.

"For example, if you want to generate documentation in the experimental GFM output format, you need to download and pass gfm-plugin's JAR (download) into the pluginsClasspath configuration option."

The output is ugly, but I decided to keep it anyway.

Time spent¶

This took surprisingly long time, around 4 hours. I had to use Gemini 3.1 Pro to help me out in tough spots. It did manage to give me good advice on e.g. the pom.xml dependencies, which saved me some time, as well as copying the JavaFX dependencies from the IDEA project. However, the Justfile and the Dokka related tips were surprisingly horrible, even if I gave it a fair amount of context from the official docs.