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...

RadRails

I decided I would try downloading the latest milestone version of Eclipse 3.2M4 and set up an IDE without all the Java development tools and just the RDT (Ruby Development Tools) that would start up faster and let me do some Rails development with less clutter. Then somehow I stumbled upon the RadRails Eclipse plugin (gotta love surfing the web). So far it seems really quite good. I can run the WEBrick server, view my PostgreSQL database, hit the web application all within Eclipse! And it also gives me a colour coded RHTML editor and better code completion than RDT. I even just subscribed to their Podcast. I haven't used it extensively yet but so far I'm quite impressed.

Eclipse Icons

I was building a web application yesterday and decided I needed some icons to replace some buttons on one of the pages. So I started googling without much success. Although I could find the odd icon or two that would work, they were different sizes, had different colour palettes etc. They just didn't come across as being part of a coherent design.

Then I was looking at Eclipse thinking I want something like that. After a little investigation I discovered where Eclipse stores its icons. Take a look in any of the plugin subdirectories that have "ui" in their names and you'll frequently find icons in a web-friendly GIF format ready for pillaging. (e.g., [ECLIPSE_HOME]/plugins/org.eclipse.jdt.ui_3.0.1/icons/full/etool16). With some of the basic icons and some of the overlay images (e.g., [ECLIPSE_HOME]/plugins/org.eclipse.jdt.ui_3.0.1/icons/full/ovr16) and a little bit of photoshopping you can create some nice consistent icons for your web application.

Tapestry and Eclipse

So first Tapestry... It's an alternative Java web application framework that is now hosted on the Jakarta Apache website. I don't know if I'm reading anything into the fact that it's an Apache project right beside Struts. It just surprised me a bit.

It's certainly a lot different than Struts and maybe that's not a bad thing. I haven't seriously gotten into it yet but one of the things I like is that you don't replace HTML tags with some proprietary tags (unlike ASP, JSP, PHP, etc.). That means that you can use whatever HTML editor you want, including WYSIWYG editors. A lot of Java people I know dismiss WYSIWYG editors but I actually like them. Anything that allows me to design (in the graphical sense) without writing code can't be all bad. So far all I've done is the requisite "Hello World", but so far so good. BTW, the next version of Tapestry includes HiveMind, one of those Dependency Injection frameworks everyone loves.

As for Eclipse I borrowed a book from the library this weekend called Contributing to Eclipse: Principles, Patterns, and Plug-Ins. One of the interesting things is that the authors are Kent Beck and Erich Gamma. Yes that Kent Beck and Erich Gamma! Big names in the geeky programmer realm. The book starts off with some background of Eclipse. When you use the Java IDE project within Eclipse it's so easy to forget that it was intended as a programming language neutral environment and that everything in Eclipse is a plug-in. Everything! Very cool. I already have some ideas for plug-ins but we'll see how the rest of the book goes.