MacCallisto

Even with a few weeks off from work I still like to keep up-to-date with what's going on in the Java world. And the biggest news so far has been the release of Eclipse 3.2 and the various other Eclipse based projects. So I downloaded 3.2 and then went on to install these other projects:

• Visual Editor (VE)
• Java EE and Web Tools (WTP)
• Test and Performance Tools (TPTP)
• Reporting Tools(BIRT)
• Data Tools (DTP)

I was happy to see that VE is now supported on Mac OS X. I was able to quickly create a very simple Swing app in just a couple minutes. I can't say too much about stability of the tool at the moment but it worked first time!

Then I moved onto the Data Tools. It was pretty easy to connect to PostgreSQL (my preferred local database) even though PostgreSQL wasn't one of the predefined driver types. I browsed my schema and then quickly learned that you need to create a SQL editor and then connect it to a database before you can issue ad-hoc queries. In the end it's nice to see these tools in Eclipse but the implementation is still pretty weak compared to something like Aqua Data Studio whose code completion features are more comprehensive.

Then because I haven't really messed around with Web Services before I figured I'd take the Eclipse web tools for a spin. Now I know why David Heinemeier Hansson calls the Web Services collection of standards, which usually sports the abbreviation WS-*, as WS-death-star! Yikes! But in the end I was able to use the wizards to create a bottom-up web service from a simple JavaBean method that returned a String and then deploy that web service in Tomcat 5.5 and then use the generated web service client, also deployed in Tomcat, to execute the method and return my String. It sure is a lot of plumbing to do something so simple but maybe for large heterogeneous enterprise IT shops the benefits for integration outweigh the overhead...

So I still have the reporting tools and the test and monitoring tools to look at but so far everything looks good in the latest Eclipse offering. But I must admit I was suffering some nasty Eclipse crashes at first with the rather nebulous "Out of Memory" exception. After a bit of monkeying around I discovered that the following changes/additions to my eclipse.ini file (within the Eclipse bundle on Mac OS X) made everything happy again:

-Xms256M
-Xmx768M
-XX:PermSize=128M

The last one in particular made the biggest difference. Let me know if you discover anything interesting...