[lwerner]

Hi,

Have any of you gotten JSP/servlet/EJB development and debugging to work with MyEclipse? If so, how?

I want to play around with EJBs to update my skills. (I’ve been doing Java API programming for years, and tinkering with servlets and JSPs for quite a while, but I haven’t done EJBs yet). I don’t want to spend tons of money, so MyEclipse’s price tag is about right (plus I just plain like the way it works).

The two free EJB containers I know of are JBoss (open-source) and Resin EE (free for personal use). But I’m pretty sure that JBoss still uses Tomcat 4, which doesn’t support the JSR-045 debugging hooks. The documentation on Resin EE isn’t clear about JSR-045, but there’s no server provider for it in MyEclipse anyway. At that point I’m out of ideas. So, does anyone know if there’s a free EJB/servlet container that supports debugging with MyEclipse?

Thanks!

Laura

[johnsw]

Take a look at Orion, http://www.orionserver.com. It is free (as far as I understand for development). You buy a licence when you deploy commercially (US$1500).

According to some research on the web, it is WAY faster than most of the commercial (expensive) app servers out there.

[Scott Anderson]

Laura,

Have any of you gotten JSP/servlet/ EJB development and debugging to work with MyEclipse? If so, how?

I don’t know if you’ve seen it or not, but there is a short J2EE development tutorial in the web documentation for the product. The web doc is more complete than the doc in EA2, but we still have a good bit to add to it before the GA release on 7/15. Sorry it’s still incomplete, but you can find it here: http://myeclipseide.com/enterpriseworkbench/help/index.jsp

I want to play around with EJBs to update my skills.

Then I’d use one of the EJB servers that’s easy to get and doesn’t charge for developer licenses. JBoss, and as John mentioned, Orion come to mind immediately. The only real problem with both of these is that the documentation is sketchy at best. However, due to JBoss’ large community if you have questions you’ll probably be able to find answers faster with it.

I don’t want to spend tons of money, so MyEclipse’s price tag is about right (plus I just plain like the way it works).

Ah! our target demographic! Developers who want supported, professional, but inexpensive tools that they don’t have to beg a company to buy for them. 🙂

But I’m pretty sure that JBoss still uses Tomcat 4, which doesn’t support the JSR-045 debugging hooks

Absolutely true. If we could get them to start bundling Tomcat 5, we’d have what we need.

The documentation on Resin EE isn’t clear about JSR-045 but there’s no server provider for it in MyEclipse anyway

JSR-045 support isn’t in Resin yet anyway. Also, we don’t need a special connector for using Resin (or JBoss Web 🙂 when bundled with JBoss; it works fine. You’d only need a standalone connector if you want to use Resin completely stand-alone as a JSP container.

So, does anyone know if there’s a free EJB/servlet container that supports debugging with MyEclipse?

Well, in all honesty none that meet all your criteria. In all the containers you can debug all your Java code to include EJB’s, servlets and web tier utility classes called from JSP pages. Heck, even your own taglibs if you have source. Basically everything. The only tough bit is source leve debugging in JSP pages. For that, you need Tomcat 5, or WebLogic 7/8. Since we support source-level JSP debugging on WebLogic, it actually has the widest debug coverage of the J2EE app servers, but it’s far from free. However, you get a multi-month trial so this may still fit your needs. If you’d like to use one of the other containers, you can just do what we do: follow the current best practices and minimize the java code in your JSP pages to very small invocations of utility classes and the like.

Truthfully, if you haven’t inherited a poorly written web app with tons of Java in the JSP pages, I personally don’t see a huge benefit to source-level JSP debugging. However, it is a great product differentiator. To that end, any server that support JSR-045 automatically gets priority for a MyEclipse connector. 🙂

–Scott
MyEclipse Support

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