Chapter 3. Creating Your First Bukkit Plugin

The Bukkit plugins that we will program will be written in the Java programming language. We will use an IDE (short for Integrated Development Environment) to write the plugins. An IDE is software that will aid us in writing the Java code. It has many tools and features that make programming much easier. For example, it automatically detects errors in code, it often tells us how to fix these errors and sometimes even does it for us, and it provides us with many shortcuts, such as a keystroke to compile code and build a JAR file so that the code can be executed. In this chapter, we will download and install an IDE and prepare it to create a new Bukkit plugin. We will cover the following topics and by the end of this chapter, we will have written our first plugin, which will be ready to be tested on our server:

• Installing an IDE
• Creating a new project
• Adding Bukkit as a library
• The plugin.yml file
• The plugin's main class
• Creating and calling new methods
• Expanding the code