Archive for the ‘Eclipse’ Category

WebLogic Server Tools For Eclipse

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

I just spent an afternoon putting too much trust in the WebLogic sever tools for Eclipse. My modest goal was to modify a JSP and see the change without me having to do anything about it. It’s just a simple file copy after all.

From what I could see there are two ways to deploy my Eclipse web project. One involves an auto-generated EAR and the other an auto-generated WAR. With either option any time I changed a JSP the auto publishing feature kicked in to rebuild the auto-generated artifact (including compilation) and to re-publish to the server. For any project of a decent size (the most common kind out there) this is completely useless, not to mention unnecessary. Furthermore the republished EAR somehow managed to consistently exhaust the connection pool.

So the only thing the plugin seems to be good for is to start and stop Weblogic from within Eclipse and possibly in debug mode. Both of these I can do just as easily and more reliably from the command line. So why isn’t there an option for deploying my web project in exploded form so that a JSP change is a simple file copy? Wouldn’t that be the simplest default?

For all the “high-end” features an application server like WebLogic provides it’s amazing to me how long countless developers have to wait for each time they make a simple JSP change.

Posted in Eclipse | No Comments »

Improved multi-monitor support for Eclipse 3.4

Thursday, February 14th, 2008

Here is a good reason to await Eclipse 3.4:
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Improve_multi-monitor_support

Posted in Eclipse | No Comments »

A First Look at Mylyn

Wednesday, February 6th, 2008

Finally got around to spending some time with Mylyn, the popular Eclipse plugin that helps you manage tasks and provides integration with task repositories like Bugzilla, JIRA, Trac, and others.

For me the CVS features built-in in Eclipse have always provided a high value day in day out. Integrating with bug tracking repositories is a further step in the same direction allows me to perform queries against JIRA for example to see issues I’m working without going to an external browser. This feature alone makes it worth having this plugin.

Taking that a step farther Mylyn provides intelligent, task sensitive, context switching. That is to say it hides or shows only what’s relevant to the task at hand in views such as the Project Explorer where you might normally browse through hundreds of files. Instead you see only the few files and methods you care about. This adds a certain kind of intelligence to Eclipse, the kind of intelligence I remember a long time when I used IntelliJ (oops, did I say that out loud?)

To learn more I recommend the Mylyn User Guide, which is actually not easy to find like anything else on eclipse.org:
http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Mylyn_User_Guide

One oddity for Linux users… Using Alt+Click (mentioned a lot in Mik Kersten’s articles on IBM DevelopreWorks) just didn’t work for me. I kept trying without any luck. Finally I discovered Alt+Click is already mapped in GNOME desktop for moving windows and needs to be disabled. Also I had to hold down the Win key (Windows logo on it) together with Alt+Click and voila it worked! The User Guide has both of these documented.

Posted in Eclipse, Linux | No Comments »