I've set up eclipse as instructed in the main tutorial on processing.org. Everything works perfectly with simple examples.

Now I've written a bunch of code to search through an xml database and draw an ellipse for each node and a connection between related nodes.

When I place my draw commands in the actual draw() block I get the following error:

Exception in thread "Animation Thread" java.lang.NullPointerException
    at xmlparse.draw(xmlparse.java:48)
    at processing.core.PApplet.handleDraw(Unknown Source)
    at processing.core.PApplet.run(Unknown Source)
    at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)

However, every now and the code runs without problem just by recompiling, which I find very strange...

However if I place the same code in the setup() block I receive no errors and the code runs perfectly.

Any insights or ideas into why this may be would be much appreciated,

Thanks.

HS