Eclipse hints, tips, and random musings

I'm moving this blog over to the new Eclipse Blogs site. I've managed to import my old blog into the site, so I should be good to go. I'll apologise in advance for the likely duplication that will occur when the new blog is aggregated into Planet Eclipse.

Labels: 60

...I may just lose it.

I've had this darned picture—taken at JavaOne 2007—on my desk for a little more than a month. I keep looking at it and thinking that I should scan it, put it on my blog and then send the original to the shredder.

As I look at this picture, I think several things:

Fortunately, I already know the answer to that last one...

Labels: 60, duke, javaone

I recently recorded a flash demo of the creation—using annotations—of a web service for JBoss 4.2 using a pre-release of the new Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers (the work-in-progress landing page is here). You can find the demo here.

Creating the web service is pretty easy.

I noticed that JBoss requires an entry in the web.xml file for the web service (to be honest, I've spent a little too much time away from this technology to know if this is typical of other application servers, or if there is a way to encourage JBoss to work without it). Rather than try to fumble my way through the bits and pieces that are required for an entry in web.xml, I instead just created a servlet. The process of creating the servlet creates entries in the deployment descriptor along with a skeleton of a servlet class.

In the next step, I deleted most of the code generated for the servlet class and reduced it to a simple POJO along the lines of:

package org.eclipse.samples.ws;



import javax.jws.WebService;



@WebService

public class Welcome {

    public String getGreeting(String name) {

        return "Hello " + name;

    }

}

It's pretty simplistic, but my intent is to show that building a web service is pretty easy, not build an actual interesting web service.

And that's about it. The next step is to run it, which I do using the Servers view. Eclipse does a great job managing the servers. During the start up, JBoss reports that the web service has started and provides a URL for WSDL generated for it. In my demonstration, I use the Web Services Explorer to play a bit. I could just as easily used the WSDL to create a Java client using the New Web Service Client wizard.

One thing I learned in setting up the demonstration is that JBoss 4.2 (and 5.0) don't run all that well with Java 6. When I attempted that, I wound up with a bunch of errors that just disappeared when I instead used a Java 5 JRE. Maybe it's just me.

I'd love your feedback on the demo.

Labels: 60, europa, jboss, web service, web tools

Today we published an article on Eclipse Corner titled, "SWT/Swing Integration". This is a pretty important topic that is of great interest to a lot of folks. The article was written by Gordon Hirsch, based on some real world experience with the SWT_AWT bridge component (which allows you to host AWT/Swing components in SWT). The abstract of the article states:

You can find the article here.

Labels: 60, articles, eclipse corner, swing, swt

I've been spending far too much time wrestling with Camtasia lately (it has a frustrating habit of completely screwing up my files). I've been putting together a collection of screencam demonstrations to accompany the Europa release. I did spend a little effort looking into using Wink to record my demonstrations, and that does seem to have some potential. I've also been tinkering with using PHP and Ming to assemble screenshots into flash-based demonstrations, but I had to abandon that effort as we're just getting too close to the Europa release to be mucking around with that.

Nathan and I have been working on some new download pages that include actual instructions for how to obtain and install Eclipse. I'm quite happy with the new 'distributions' of Eclipse being created by the Packaging project (which are nicely complemented by the member company distributions). It's nice to have an collection of integrated IDE packages for folks who just want to write Java code and don't need to build plug-ins (and therefore don't really need the PDE or the source code).

The new site (which will become the official download page on Europa release day, is here. If you follow the links to "More info", you'll find the demonstrations that I've been working on. They're not all complete (and so are not all there yet). The Java IDE page is far closer to the final form than any of the others. I'm particularly fond of the installation instructions that detail how to install Eclipse in a shared (i.e. multiple-user) environment and what to do with those annoying requests for a password on Windows. I'd love to hear what you think. Bugzilla is probably the best place to add your comments.

In the process of making a demonstration titled "Adding Features from the Europa Update Site", I spent a little time with the Ruby Development Tools. I've only just started playing with them, but the support has thus far been first class.

Labels: 57, IDE, Ruby, screenshots

I spent the last (you might say 'better') part of my day yesterday hanging out with some of my old friends at Oracle, trying to help them get their new Eclipse project up and running. The Eclipse Persistence Services project, which is affectionately known as "EclipseLink" is inheriting some awesome code from Oracle. EclipseLink will provide all sorts of persistence services; the project proposal lists a few of the mechanisms that EclipseLink will provide:



They also have some stuff that's a lot more powerful (and flexible) than the standards listed.

The project is in the provisioning stage. It will (of course) have to incubate for a while. So long as the project follows the 'incubation' rules, it can benefit from the parallel IP process. This means, that the code will make it into the repository fairly quickly (after a license compatibility check is done), so you should be able to start playing with EclipseLink soon (you'll have to install some Subversion plug-ins).

A couple of new blogs should soon be added to Planet Eclipse: the EclipseLink Team Blog, and Doug Clarke's Java Persistence blog. The newsgroup is also ready for your questions.

Labels: 57, eclipselink, persistence

Yesterday, Ian posted an entry in his blog asking for community help to test a new downloads page that we'd like to realize for the Europa release. On this page are several new distributions of Eclipse. I've been testing various version of these packages for a while, and—for a first release—it's looking pretty good.

Over the last few days, I've been reviewing the "Eclipse Tools for Java Enterprise Developers" package. This package contains the tools that you need to build, test, debug, and refactor Java, as well as tools for building applications based on Java EE technologies like servlets, JavaServer Pages, Enterprise JavaBeans, and web services (including support for Java EE 5). It also includes tools for editing HTML, CSS, and XML files, and more.

I've used it to all sorts of things including building and deploying applications on Tomcat 5.5 and 6.0, and JBoss 4.2. It all works swimmingly. One wrinkle is that the application servers themselves aren't part of the package; you have to download and unpack these separately. Mercifully, you don't have to do any configuration: the Eclipse Web Tools takes care of setting up instances of the application servers for you to test your code against.

Something that's new is the Web Page Editor. I've been using this to touch up some HTML pages on a site that I maintain. I've also been tinkering with a few JSPs. I haven't had the guts yet to try JSF (for some intangible reason, JSF scares me), but apparently that's supported as well. Here's a screenshot of the Web Page Editor in action:

It occurred to me to try and force it to work with PHP files (by adding a file association in the preferences), but it didn't work. The Web Page Editor just doesn't understand the tags. However, the beauty of having an extensible framework means that extensions to support that sort of thing should hopefully be something we can look forward to in the future.

Overall, I'm happy with the package. I like that it includes Mylar. I like that it doesn't include the PDE or any of the source code (Java EE developers don't need these). I'd like to see a future version include Subversion support, but that depends on the Subversive team getting an Eclipse 3.3-compatible release ready.

Bug 187879 has become the rallying point for discussion about our potential new download page; it also contains some discussion about the content of the packages. If you're interested in helping to improve the Eclipse experience for new developers, please add your comments to this bug. If you find specific problems with any of the packages or just want to add your thoughts about what the existing packages should contain, look for (or contribute new) bugs against the EPP project. Of course, there's also the EPP newsgroup.

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Labels: europa, packaging, web tools