[vjenks]

I’m evaluating MyEclipse for my company as we standardize on Java technologies for all of our application development.

I’m having more trouble w/ MyEclipse than I was ever having w/ WTP from Eclipse…and that’s hard to believe, quite frankly.

For example, in my project, I’ve created a servlet. I cannot run the servlet even after deploying it (it hasn’t been deployed even though the deployment was deemed “successful”) and I cannot debug it…or anything else.

I’ve configured Resin 3.0.x as my app server and when I click the run button and “Start” it…the server starts but I don’t get a debug window. When running the Eclipse debug there is no appropriate selection to debug a servlet.

When creating a JSP, I don’t have a “preview” tab as the flash tutorial shows. In fact, nothing works quite like the tutorial shows.

I’m using Eclipse 3.1 and the appropriate MyEclipse installation for Eclipse 3.1 (4.0 something or other.) Yes, my install of eclipse was a fresh one and has no other plugins installed (aside from the default “vanilla” download.)

I got an error on install which said:

Install Action:           RPMSpecFile
                          Status: ERROR
                          Additional Notes: ERROR - There was a problem creating the RPM package. You may not be running as root or may not have installed RPM Builder correctly.
                                            ERROR - java.lang.NullPointerException

When I try to exec the MyEclipse binary after install I get:

JVM terminated. Exit code=1
/opt/jdk1.5.0_04/bin/java
-jar startup.jar
-os linux
-ws gtk
-arch x86
-launcher /opt/my_eclipse_ide/MyEclipse_Enterprise_Workbench/MyEclipse
-name MyEclipse
-showsplash 600
-exitdata 270001
-vm /opt/jdk1.5.0_04/bin/java
-vmargs
-jar startup.jar 

…so, I just launched eclipse and created a MyEclipse project…since I had no other choice. I’m on Gentoo Linux using J2SE 1.5. I will be using this on Windows as well but only at work…and would not like to “just go w/ the Windows version” to solve my problems…please.

I’m really finding this not very intuitive at all…please feel free to point out what I’m doing wrong because I can’t figure it out. MyEclipse appears to have *all* of the features we need…and more…but it hasn’t been intuitive thus far. I was able to at least launch and debug and application fairly quickly w/ the free WTP plugins so I suppose I’m just looking for what my advantage might be by spending good money on a commercial alternative.

Thanks!

-v

[Riyad Kalla]

V, I think you hit the nail on the head, there is some fundamental miscommunication occuring and I think there might even be an install issue happening here. Let me note a few things first, let’s not try and be fancy let’s just go step by step and make sure everything works:

1) Don’t emerge Eclipse, go download the Eclipse 3.1 SDK from eclipse.org (around 100mb). Make sure you get the 3. 1GA release, MyEclipse 4.0 don’t work on any other release.

2) Go ahead and unzip the SDK to your home folder someplace (don’t try and get fancy and have a system-wide install of Eclipse and play with permissions, this won’t work with the trial version of MyEclipse). Let’s just get the most basic install working first so you can evaluate the features.

3) Now run the MyEclipse 4.0 M3 for Eclipse 3.1 GA installer and install it in your home directory against your newly unzipped Eclipse install. Now go fire up Eclipse.

4) Create a new workspace, don’t use an existing one, and be sure to open the MyEclipse perspective.

Now go here: http://www.myeclipseide.com/ContentExpress-display-ceid-67.html

and start with the Working with Web Projects quickstart guide, work your way through that getting a feel for how things are laid out and how they function. Also try the “Using the HTML Editor” guide as well. Between these two you should be pretty dangerous. The only thing that will not be available to you is the HTML/JSP/Struts/JSF visual page designer. The visual page designing is currently Windows only (we are evaluating different cross platform solutions).

Now, I’d like to point out the potential causes of all the problems previously:
1) Custom patched builds of Eclipse from Gentoo or the wrong build.
2) Not using the full Eclipse SDK
3) INstalling Eclipse and MyEclipse as different users and running them. Without a subscription for MyEclipse this causes Thread privaledge exceptions during run time.
4) MyEclipse builds ontop of WTP, so if you were using MyEclipse and WTP in the same Eclipse install, that would certainly explain some of the strangeness as there were likely API breaks between the newer version of WTP you were using and the version MyEclipse builds on (Eclipse platform will load the newer of the two plugins, leaving MyEclipse in an unusable situation).

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