Pimping Eclipse Ganymede

Today I decided to try the new Eclipse Ganymede (3.4), but honestly after setting up Eclipse with all the plugins that I am used to have at hand right away, upgrading it to a new version doesn't seem so appealing to me, on the other hand, I'm open to new functionalities and enhancements and I was curious about javaFX (it requires the new Eclipse) and its possibilities to use the same code for a RIA in a browser, mobile or desktop, so this was enough for me.

As usual downloading and installing Eclipse couldn't be easier, so after doing it I started thinking about my favorite plugins and noticed how it is always a problem for me to remember them , so it seemed useful to create this list and share it with the world.

• Eclemma: is a Java code coverage tool for Eclipse that allows the user to adopt EMMA's philosophy in an easier and more graphical way.

  • Update site: http://update.eclemma.org/

• Jar Class finder: allows the user to find Java classes and solve NoClassDefFound exceptions, specially useful while searching for a class inside a group of jars.

  • Download site: http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/jarclassfinder/download

• DBviewer: this plugin lets you view the database structure (schema/tables/column), execute queries and includes content assistant, among other features.

  • Download site: http://sourceforge.jp/projects/dbviewer/releases/

• Subclipse: an open source plugin to provide support for Subversion inside Eclipse. A great asset for Linux users since there is no equivalent to Tortoise yet.

  • Update site: http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.6.x

• m2eclipse: is the Maven integration for Eclipse, takes care of the dependency management and automatic download, plus launching Maven builds.

  • Update site: http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org/update/

• Origo Mylin connector: if you are working on a task-focused project using Mylin, this connector will let you use Origo as the open/closed source hosting site.

  • Update site: http://download.origo.ethz.ch/mylyn/update-site-2.0.0/

Joomla 1.5

This weekend I had the time to play for a while with the new version of the award winning content management system (CMS) Joomla 1.5. It was the first time ever I used this app, so I tried the installation wizard available at the hosting company's server and the first step was painless and quick.

After checking Joomla's site I noticed that the project is very well documented and found out in a few minutes how to use the basic features. This CMS seems to take away some of the common headaches for website developers with the variety of solutions that includes, since it's an open source application based on modules and plugins developed by a big community that is backing up the project.

I created categories, sections, menu items and a couple of articles, disabled some unnecessary modules and activated some others, then I started googling for some more components and extensions and ended up amazed with the huge amount of products available.

Fireboard was the first thing in my list, once again the installation was very easy, probably the only trick is to enable "System - Legacy" at the plugin manager, and just like that I had a complete forum ready to use.

The second component installation wasn't as easy as with Fireboard, after reading why an SEO was important for my site, I decided to try sh404SEF. Seems logical to install it in case you want to improve the possibilities for people to find your site by making the urls search engine friendly, in the end sh404SEF will replace the default Joomla urls that look like this:

http://www.yourdomain.com/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=34&Itemid=55

for something understandable for the search engine like:

http://www.yourdomain.com/why-seo-matters.html

It seems that a common error after the installation is to access the main page of your site www.yourdomain.com and get an access error, you can solve this pretty easily by creating an index.html file at yourdomainfolder/httpdocs/index.html redirecting people to www.yourdomain.com/joomla/index.php like this:

<meta equiv="REFRESH" content="0; url=http://www.yourdomain.com/joomla/index.php" >

After installing and setting up these plugins the options to create a professional site in a few days are huge an easy, you can check for more extensions here and knock yourself out.

JavaFX 1.1 on Linux using Netbeans 6.5 or Eclipse 3.4

If you are looking forward to try javaFX and you are a Linux user, probably you already know that the released versions are for Windows and Mac, fortunately there are already some hacks available to make the Mac version work on Linux. Not all the features are available and we'll still have to wait till Sun releases the official version, but in the mean time you can give it a try in Netbeans this way.

If while trying to install the linux sdk .nbm file in Netbeans, you get the following error "Some plugins require capability javafx.sdk.v1_1 No plugin providing the capability javafx.sdk.v1_1 could be found", check the content of the file org-netbeans-modules-javafx-sdk-lin.nbm (using unzip -l), probably the zip process failed and some files are missing.

To use it in Eclipse, first download and install the plugin here using the update site. Then unzip the file org-netbeans-modules-javafx-sdk-lin.nbm used previously for the Netbeans installation. Inside you will find the follwing folder "netbeans/javafx-sdk/", move the folder to your preffered location. Now in Eclipse edit the new classpath variable JAVAFX_HOME in Eclipse at Preferences -> Java -> Build Path -> Classpath Variables by pointing to the javafx-sdk location.

That's it, now you can use javaFX 1.1 in both of your IDEs, as I told you before, is not a complete version but it's a good way to start working on it until the new version is released.