Help and opinions on using ROS Java (Indigo)

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Hi,

I've been reading a lot of the help topics regarding ROS Java but many of them are 3+ years old, so I'm hesitant to follow any advice from those blindly.

1) I'm trying to create a Java application that includes a ROS service in it. Is following the steps in the ROS Java tutorial and modifying the default Talker and Listener programs for my purposes a good approach or is there a better method?

2) I'm having an extremely hard time getting an external JAR file dependency configured into my project. I've tried numerous different things in the build.gradle file and followed their documentation such as adding the following:

dependencies { compile files('path/to/file.jar') }

But this is still giving me errors when I run catkin_make. Does anyone know if there's a better way for this, or if I'm missing any steps I need to take?

Any help or comments are greatly appreciated.