JBoss Eclipse IDE - XDoclet not working
The time has come for me to get serious about learning J2EE. I’ve started on a new project, and the code is going to run in JBoss. So naturally, I’ve spent some time looking at options for tooling up Eclipse to cope with the demands of JBoss developing. First port of call was the Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP), which has just gone to release 1.0. There’s no update URL yet (being fixed), so you have to download a mega-archive with Eclipse 3.1.1 and all the plugins. Then you have to spend time getting that to look like your old version of Eclipse, though exporting and and re-importing preferences helps. You still have to re-install your other plugins though (e.g. the very handy AnyEdit). Sigh. However, having installed it, there’s a dearth of decent documentation. I tried working through the tutorial, but it was written for version 0.7 and most of the tools have changed. Still, I got to the point where I had a deployable JSP, published it to the running server instance and …. nothing. Deploying a WAR directly to JBoss with Ant works fine, but publishing from WTP fails silently. Since I don’t have a clear conceptual model of what WTP is supposed to do - and the documentation doesn’t help - I can’t diagnose what went wrong. Spent some time fiddling, posted to their forum, then gave up around 01:30. If I ever find out what should have happened, I’ll post a follow-up.
In the meantime, I’ve switched to JBoss’s own JBoss Eclipse
IDE. This is available as an Eclipse
update URL. So, did that, first getting a clean new install of Eclipse 3.1.1.
Fired that up, went to look at the HTML editor, and I get a bunch of spurious
warnings (e.g. unrecognised HTML entities on properly escaped URL strings).
This looks like cross-talk with previously installed HTML editors, so I removed
my ~/workspace directory (where a lot of the local Eclipse settings are
stored). Try again, this time all is working well. Spend more time getting
Eclipse working how I like it (maybe I should educate myself to like the
defaults, but currently I dont!). Fine. Now work through the tutorial from the
JBoss web site. All seems well, except that when I run the XDoclet task,
nothing visible happens. Checking the error log, there’s a message:
Error logged from Ant UI:
java.net.SocketTimeoutException: Accept timed out
Like Bug 102463, I
fixed this by resetting ANT HOME in the preferences dialog, which was
pointing (bizarrely) to /usr/share/eclipse. I reset it to point to the
org.apache.ant_1.6.5 subdirectory in the plugins directory of my local copy
of Eclipse. After restarting Eclipse, XDoclet ran correctly.
Why is this stuff so painful?