Eclipse

Eclipse

Features in Eclipse itself

I've just started using Eclipse for the sake of the folding editor and plug-ins. Wish there were a plug-in for previewing CSS, though there is a simple CSS editor plug-in.

MyEclipse

Many consider the MyEclipse plugin (actually a set of plugins) to be an essential add-on for Eclipse. It's not free but it's very inexpensive (just over $30). It has a huge list of features including.

  • Smart HTML, Struts, JSF, CSS, Javascript, SQL, Hibernate, and J2EE deployment descriptors editors
  • JSP source editor
  • XML and XSD editors with smart code completion, DTD caching for offline support
  • Validation for HTML, XML, XSD, DTD, JSP, XSL and XMI files
  • Visual HTML Designer for WYSIWYG development, real-time preview, and round trip code generation
  • Struts configuration editor with code completion
  • Struts designer providing graphical drag-n-drop web flow design synchronized with struts-config.xml source
  • Java Server Faces (JSF) Developer - Graphical Navigation Flow Designer
  • Hibernate development tools with productivity wizards, code generation, and DB Explorer connector integration.
  • Database explorer, 25 DB-JDBC connector profiles, SQL editor with code completion and SQL query evaluation and testing.
  • Spring IDE Integration
  • Tapestry Support
  • Ad-hoc image preview for GIF, JPG, BMP, PNG, ICO image types.
  • Snippet catalog with included library of HTML, JavaScript, CSS, JSP, Struts, and JSF snippets
  • JSTL project support, add JSTL 1.0 Jars and Taglibs to any web-project
  • Application Server Integration
    • Over 20 application server connectors including Bejy Tiger, JBoss, Jetty, Jonas, JRun, Oracle, Orion, Resin, Sun Java System, Tomcat, WebLogic and WebSphere.
    • Integrated controls for starting, stopping servers.
  • Comprehensive UML support

It is available from http://www.myeclipseide.com/

Sysdeo Tomcat plugin

Eclipse-wise, just being able to start and stop Tomcat from a GUI rather than from multiple DOS windows is a delight.

Eclipse Web Toolkit Project

For those using Eclipse, the Eclipse Web Toolkit Project looks very promising, though it is currently a bit rough around the edges. Moving forward with JSR-168 and alternate view technologies like JSP/JSTL, integrated refactoring tools for both Java and presentation code sounds wonderful.

Eclipse Tutorials

Configuration

  • For more information on configuring Eclipse to operate with uPortal 2.5 visit Practical uP25 XML Changes
  • Add all the jars in the uportal/lib/cache folder to the build path library list
  • Add xercesImpl.jar to the build path library list