[Roman Sykora]

Hi everybody,

since MyEclipse IDE 3.8 seems to be only a marketing hoax, i’ll switch back to the beta that is much more stable and usable than this GA 3.8 version.

Don’t get me wrong. Eclipse/MyEclipseIDE is really my favourite java/2ee programming environment and i use it since the beginning but this latest release seems to be /at most/ an alpha and I regret having it installed, infected by the overwhelming promised feature richness and the zealous news about it.

I’ve already invested too much time for installation, configuration and forum reading, to provide detailed error descriptions, but here are a few “highlights”

– deployment is not possible if j2ee library set is disabled (i use another j2ee.jar. although this problem is since 3.8 BETA 1)
– ear deployment doesn’t work; no wars, no ejb-jars( no i don’t want exploded deployments)
– jsp compilation is not configurable anymore, but strange jsp errors occur ( cannot resolve symbol: symbol : method getThrowable (javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest). NOTE: No JSP line number was avaliable so line 1 was used for the marker. error.jsp vwv2-web/web/hietzing/jsp line 1 August 18, 2004 1:38:31 PM.
AFAIK this method is not applicable in j2ee 1.3 )
– htmltidy problem markers everywhere ( html validation IS disabled !! )
– jstl problem markers anywhere (expressions not allowed etc..)
– strange errors in the “error” view (they seem to come from the .log file)
– /VERY/ slow editors for jsps, deploymentdescriptors ..
– configuration got really cryptic over the time
.
.

Looking forward to another great MyEclipse release.
Roman Sykora

ps: Yes, I’m not a native english speaker and my vocabulary and my grammar could be better.

[Riyad Kalla]

1) Can you explain more what you mean here? Set on the projects Build Path or configured under the Preferences dialog?
2) Known bug
3) Multiple known bugs
4) Known bug
5) Known bug
6) What strange errors?
7) Known problem with the WTP editors
8) How so?

Thank you for taking the time for the feedback, we know you guys are pissed off, you should be… we are embaressed with what happened but will fix it if it kills us.

[siderean]

I speak only for myself (but hopefully others feel the same). I’ve been anxiously awaiting 3.8 for a while and have really enjoyed the betas. I’m excited by all the new functionality and can’t wait to use it. While I was very dissapointed in 3.8GA, I’m pretty confident you’ll get the wrinkles worked out and I still think very highly of the product in general. Keep up the great work!

[Riyad Kalla]

Thanks siderean for the words of support, everything positive helps the team right now.

[michael_talavera]

I want to echo the comment by siderean in that I have also been awaiting the new release and am confident that the MyEclipse team will work everything out. Software development is not an exact science and with all the new features that are in place, there are bound to be kinks that need to be ironed out. I suspect this is what 3.8.1 that is currently being monitored on the home page is all about. It seems that people are caught up with the version being labeled GA and not another beta.

[Michael Schulz]

@michael_talavera wrote:

I want to echo the comment by siderean in that I have also been awaiting the new release and am confident that the MyEclipse team will work everything out. Software development is not an exact science and with all the new features that are in place, there are bound to be kinks that need to be ironed out. I suspect this is what 3.8.1 that is currently being monitored on the home page is all about. It seems that people are caught up with the version being labeled GA and not another beta.

I would agree with the sentiment that we (your loyal customers) are going to wait for the 3.8ga wrinkles to be worked out (myEclipse is a great product), however, I do not agree with the comment “people are caught up with the version being labeled ‘ga'” – I think customers have a right to expect that “ga” level code is better and more reliable than “beta” code. I also found a number of problems in 3.8ga that have required me to go back to 3.8 beta2 which was working fine for me. I was excited to see that the long-awaited “project root == web root” was finally being delivered and disappointed to see that it did not work at all. I also encountered a number of “out of memory” errors that prevented my project from even building. The first time I installed 3.8ga it was not even recognized by Eclipse as a plugin or anything. I had to uninstall and then reinstall into a different folder name in order to get Eclipse to recognize myeclipse 3.8ga! These are clearly not the kind of issues that one expects to see in “ga” level code. Anyway, I lost a good 1/2 day doing all this testing (:<) and now I will go back to my previous configuration and wait for a better release.

myEclipse team: hang in there – none of us are perfect! myEclipse management team: there are lessons to be learned from this incident! I suspect some qa processes broke down. I would also suggest that after reading the “new features and bug fixes after beta2” that too many new features were crammed into a very late product release!

Respectfully submitted,
Mike Schulz

[Riyad Kalla]

Mike,

I was excited to see that the long-awaited “project root == web root” was finally being delivered and disappointed to see that it did not work at all

What didn’t work? What was your setup? Now is the time to file bugs with us, we are in crazy-fix-mode and I’d hate for a new maintenence release to go out and you still not be able to use ME the way you want to.

I also encountered a number of “out of memory” errors that prevented my project from even building

Its a PIA, the new WTP editors make use of the JDT indexer on your files (JSP, etc.) which didn’t used to happen before, also the indexer uses memory like CRAZY (200 jsp files can take up more than 700mb of memory), its a known bug with JDT and they are working on it from what I read.

I had to uninstall and then reinstall into a different folder name in order to get Eclipse to recognize myeclipse 3.8ga!

Because we have all of our releases installed into different dirs (3.8Beta1, 3.8Beta2, 3.8RC1, 3.8RC2, etc. etc.) we didn’t consider the use case where people “Disable” their myeclipse dir (3.8 for example) and then unzip the GA release back into the disabled folder that Eclipse keeps ‘Disabled’… we should have clarified to erase the /configuration directory to clear out that state before unzipping the new GA install.

[Michael Schulz]

Ok – here we go again on the project root == web root issue.
Let’s try a simple example: Tomcat 5.x – ships with a webapp named “servlets-examples”. I want to work on this project in myEclipse. I try to create the web project using the following options:
Project Name: “servlets-examples”
Use Default Location: unchecked
Directory: C:\tomcat-5.0.25\webapps\servlets-examples
Source Folder: “WEB-INF/classes”
Web root folder: “/”
Context root URL: “/servlets-examples”
J2EE 1.4 Spec (default)
JSTL support: unchecked

When I click on “Finish”, I receive the following message:

Window title: “!NewProjectCreationWizard.op_error.title!”
Message Line1: “!NewProjectCreationWizard.op_error.message!”
Message Line2: “Path must include project and resource name: /servlets-examples”

When I click OK (my only option), I am back at the new project wizard dialog again. My options are OK and Cancel. Pressing OK again gives me the same error message. Pressing cancel causes the New Project Wizard dialog to disappear, and the project appears in the workspace.
Looking at the newly created project, I see a bin folder containing subfolders such as “images” and “WEB-INF”. IMHO the “bin” folder should not be there, because it was not part of my original webapp. At this point, I attempt to create a deployment for this project. The “New Deployment” wizard appears, with the following values:
Web Project: “servlets-examples”
Server: Tomcat5 (which I enabled and configured in the myEclipse preferences pages)
Deploy Type: Exploded Archive
Deploy Location: <disabled>
Finish Button: <disabled>
Cancel Button: <enabled>

At this point, my only option is “Cancel”.
I cannot continue and I cannot create a deployment.

So there is a simple, hopefully reproduceable example of what fails.

I will restate my original idea of what project root == web root means:

The ability to take a currently deployed web app, in it’s context within the webserver (such as the ‘servlets-examples’ webapp that ships with Tomcat), load it into myEclipse, and be able to modify/run/debug the webapp.

Please let me know if you need more information regarding this issue.

I have to uninstall 3.8ga now 🙁 so that I can get back to work.

Hope this helps.

-Mike

[Riyad Kalla]

Mike,
I just did exactly your walkthough and everything worked fine… the only different is that as a source path I used “/WEB-INF/classes” not “WEB-INF/classes” and I also left the “webroot” field empty.

I will file these two issues as bugs so we can be more helpful with warnings here.

Also the deployment worked *fine* to… it didn’t deploy anything because it was already deployed. I even made a few changes and ran it and it worked….

I have to uninstall 3.8ga now 🙁 so that I can get back to work.

I think there is something going around in the air… it seems no one can make a post without a little jab at the end of it…

[Michael Schulz]

Riyad, thanks for the information; I will create a separate install of myEclipse so I can install and test your suggestions in a non-production environment, which is what I should have done before! (:o)

Also, I apologize for the late jab at the end. It was not very professional.

I continue to be encouraged by myEclipse, it’s feature set, and most importantly, the people who make it – especially since those very people who have the integrity to admit when something went wrong and to make good on it!

-Mike Schulz

[ingesol]

Just installed 3.8.1, still not working at all for me. Going back to beta2 again. Annoying, spent 15 minutes upgrading, will now spend 15 more minutes downgrading for the second time.

Problems:
– Still not working with taglib definitions in imported jsp-file, like this: <%@ include file=”/jsp/common/imports.jsp” %>
– Code formatting not working for JSP-files (Ctrl+Shift+F)

My work is very dependent on these two and other features, I thought they would be fixed for 3.8.1, am I wrong?

[ingesol]

<nested:define property=”categoryName” id=”categoryNameString” type=”String” />
<bean:message key=”admin.category.name.new” arg0=”<%= categoryNameString %>” />

This code gives the error: “categoryNameString cannot be resolved”
which is obviously wrong. It seems to me that the JSP editor problems of 3.8GA needs a couple more maintenance releases…

[Riyad Kalla]

ingesol,
I have reopened the include bug and filed the new bug you provided.

Also the formatting had to be temporarily disabled as it was mangling valid pages and after looking into it, fixing it is not a simple quick job so we delayed it until a later release.

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