[taliesin]

@scott wrote:

I am having a similar problem also on OSX, I installed a fresh Eclipse 2.1.1, installed JDT, then MyEclipse

… You need to install the complete Eclipse distribution, which includes the PDE, not any of the smaller distributions. …

–Scott
MyEclipse Support

I’m having the same problem with an install on MacOSX. Could you be a little more explicit about what constitutes the “complete Eclipse distribution”, please?

I installed http://mirror.island.liu.se/eclipse/downloads/drops/R-2.1.1-200306271545/eclipse-SDK-2.1.1-macosx-carbon.zip which seems not to do the job, although the Eclipse site seems not to offer anything more “complete”. Is there some more full distro somewhere? Or do you mean some sort of Eclipse-as-a-Java-IDE distro?

I notice that the MyEclipse installer skips the stage named “alias folder”, and the pre-installation summary has “do not install” in that field, which isn’t encouraging. Is that significant?

I have JDK 1.3.1 and 1.4.1 installed, but no idea how I’d check and/or change which one is being used to run Eclipse. any advice?

Thanks,
Keith

[Scott Anderson]

Keith,

I split your post into its own thread so that we can address it directly, rather than as a leaf on a closed topic.

I’m having the same problem with an install on MacOSX. Could you be a little more explicit about what constitutes the “complete Eclipse distribution”, please?

The complete distribution of Eclipse contains the platform, JDT, and PDE. The easiest way to tell is to open the <eclipse>/plugins directory and seeing how many plugins begin with org.eclipse.pde.*. There should be 7. If there aren’t any, you just have the JDT or platform builds and MyEclipse won’t run.

I installed http://mirror.island.liu.se/eclipse/downloads/drops/R-2.1.1-200306271545/eclipse-SDK-2.1.1-macosx-carbon.zip which seems not to do the job, although the Eclipse site seems not to offer anything more “complete”.

I downloaded this and gave it a look and it “appears” to be complete. However, we only test against the distributions available on the Eclipse website here:
http://download2.eclipse.org/downloads/drops/R-2.1.1-200306271545/
I’d suggest you download the distribution for the Mac and install it. Please pay strict attention to the instructions you’re given at download regarding StuffIt versions and which browser to use or the installation will fail.

I notice that the MyEclipse installer skips the stage named “alias folder”, and the pre-installation summary has “do not install” in that field, which isn’t encouraging. Is that significant?

Actually, that’s what it is supposed to do on the Mac at this point. Our installer team never quite got the alias installation working in usable fashion so we decided it was better to bypass it on the Mac platform rather than give the user something goofy or unexpected. We’ll look into it again when we build the installer for the next service release.

I have JDK 1.3.1 and 1.4.1 installed, but no idea how I’d check and/or change which one is being used to run Eclipse. any advice?

The JDK used to launch Eclipse is specified in a ‘.plist’ file that is down under Eclipse.app. You’ll need to use a Terminal window to find it. I think the full name is Eclipse.plist, but I’m not positive. In any case, the .plist file is an XML document that specifies all the launch parameters for Eclipse. Within it you’ll see that either JDK 1.3.1 or 1.4.1 has been specified. Eclipse 2.1.1 needs JDK 1.3.1 on the Mac to function properly, but that’s typically how the Eclipse installation sets everything up by default. Still good to check though. When you launch your application servers, we recommend configuring MyEclipse to use JDK 1.4.1 for them so that you can take advantage of HotSwap debugging.

Hopefully, that’s enough info to resolve the issue. Please let us know if you have any more questions and what the outcome is.

–Scott
MyEclipse Support

[taliesin]

Well, I downloaded a “full” Eclipse install, and installed MyEclispe on top. Did a bit of configuring so as I could see the MyEclipse tools, then started working though http://www.myeclipseide.com/Articles/XDocletWebTutorial.html

The problem with this is that it’s MS Windows specific, and so, it turns out, is MyEclispe: the standard web doclet has “src” and not “Java Source” in it as a default path. Causing the ant build to fail. Took me a while to work that out. So, I changed that path, regenerated the build files, ran ant again—eclipse hung for about five minutes, and after I restarted the entire MyEclipse configuration seemed to have vanished from the UI. The Install Configuration view has remembered that I did something with something that had “MyEclispe” in its path, but that’s all. No sign of any plug-ins.

I’m logged in here on my 30-day evaluation, and so far my evaluation of MyEclispe is “much more trouble than it’s worth (not suprising since it doesn’t work and is therefore worthless)”. I have to ask, has this product actually been tested on MacOS X, or are your developers simply hoping for the best?

Keith[/url]

[Scott Anderson]

Keith,

I’ll do my best to answer your questions and clear up any confusion you might have.

The problem with this is that it’s MS Windows specific, and so, it turns out, is MyEclispe: the standard web doclet has “src” and not “Java Source” in it as a default path. Causing the ant build to fail.

This issue has nothing to do with being “windows specific”. It is simply a disconnect between the default settings of the web project wizard and the web xdoclet settings. It’s inconvenient and there is a feature request already in our tracking system to address it. But it has nothing to do with windows vs. mac. It behaves that way on all platforms. We’ll be addressing it in an upcoming service release. Sorry for the confusion it caused.

ran ant again—eclipse hung for about five minutes…
The Install Configuration view has remembered that I did something with something that had “MyEclispe” in its path, but that’s all. No sign of any plug-ins.

For this one we’ll probably need to consult the Eclipse log file to figure out what is going on since it certainly isn’t normal. The log file is located under your Eclipse workspace directory at <workspace>/.metadata/.log. If you’ll email it to support@genuitec.com we’ll be glad to take a look at it and see what’s up.

I’m logged in here on my 30-day evaluation, and so far my evaluation of MyEclispe is “much more trouble than it’s worth (not suprising since it doesn’t work and is therefore worthless)”. I have to ask, has this product actually been tested on MacOS X, or are your developers simply hoping for the best?

I think this is uncalled for. While you have had some installation problems we’ve done our best to work through them with you. We thoroughly test on the Mac, as we do on Windows and Linux and have several hundred Mac users at this point. With any large product distribution there will be some configurations that for whatever reason will be problematic. Nothing is 100% and we do our best to ensure that we take care of all our subscribers. Even the trial ones. Check out how some of the major software providers handle trials (ie. no support at all) and you should begin to appreciate our approach.

For future reference, ending with a paragraph like this is not the best way to introduce yourself to the community or to those who take the time to help you sort out this issue. That said, we still want to help you figure out what’s wrong with your configuration and sending us the log file is the best step toward that end.

–Scott
MyEclipse Support

[taliesin]

Scott,
I do apreciate your assistance, and I apologise for the sharp tone of my last posting. As you can probably imagine, I was pretty frustrated after my first two evenings experience with the tool.

I can’t, unfortunately, send you the log file, since I ended up deleting that installation of Eclipse to start again from scratch. I’ll bear this in mind in future, however.

What would be very useful for me would be a tutorial that did some trivial thing with raw J2EE facilities, rather than one that tries to show off how great XDoclet is. You wouldn’t happen to know where there is one?

That was the only tutorial for the tool I could find on your site. With a raft of configuration to do to get XDoclet to (so far as I can tell) generate meta-data that, in the simplest case, MyEclispe generates anyway (and has to be turned off for the purposes of the tutorial) the tutorial isn’t a great introduction to what the tool itself can do.

By the way, the code in the tutorial, that we’re told to use to replace the auto-generated servlet etc, when copied form the page as seen in Safari 1.0 and then pasted into the Eclispe editor generated a compile error for every single whitespace character. (That didn’t improve my mood 🙂

Apologies again,
Keith

[Scott Anderson]

Keith,

I do apreciate your assistance, and I apologise for the sharp tone of my last posting. As you can probably imagine, I was pretty frustrated after my first two evenings experience with the tool.

Fair enough. I think we’ve all been there before. I’ve *almost* posted/emailed the same sentiments about various things several times myself over the years. Since “net memory” is forever I do my best to be careful. In all honesty, just the install and learning curve of Eclipse on the Mac is pretty daunting, without MyEclipse at all. 🙂

I can’t, unfortunately, send you the log file, since I ended up deleting that installation of Eclipse to start again from scratch. I’ll bear this in mind in future, however.

OK, we’ll catch it next time. But that would’ve given us the insight to see what is going on.

What would be very useful for me would be a tutorial that did some trivial thing with raw J2EE facilities, rather than one that tries to show off how great XDoclet is. You wouldn’t happen to know where there is one?

Part of the problem with the path you went down was starting with our XDoclet web tutorial. It’s really an advanced tutorial intended for users who want to opt to use the XDoclet facilities within MyEclipse. It’s really not intended as an introduction to the tool at all. We do have a very basic web tutorial that is part of our documentation set. It’s available within the MyEclipse User Guild that is bundled in the Help section of the installation. However, it would probably be better if you read it first and then became motivated for that next reinstallation, so it’s also available on the portal here:
http://myeclipseide.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=PostWrap&file=index&page=http://myeclipseide.com/enterpriseworkbench/help/index.jsp
Once on the documentation page, click on MyEclipse User Guide > Getting Started > Web Development and Deployment Tutorial . Actually, you might want to read the whole ‘Getting Started’ section in order so you can see what tools are available within MyEclipse too.

By the way, the code in the tutorial, that we’re told to use to replace the auto-generated servlet etc, when copied form the page as seen in Safari 1.0 and then pasted into the Eclispe editor generated a compile error for every single whitespace character.

I tried this out on Windows and it worked flawlessly, but on the Mac with both Safari and IE I replicated the behavior you’re reporting (see, we do have Macs to test on :-). I did a ‘View Source’ from the browser and verified that the HTML used for spaces is the standard ‘ ‘ character so it is odd that this isn’t translated to a space properly on the Mac during a copy/paste as it is on Windows. I have no idea why not, but I agree it’s very inconvenient at best. I did manage to work around the problem by copying one of the invalid space characters and using Find/Replace to fix the problem by pasting the invalid character into the ‘find’ portion and a normal space into the ‘replace’ section and selecting ‘Replace All’.

I hope you’ll give the simple tutorial in the documentation a try and give us another go.

–Scott
MyEclipse Support

[taliesin]

Part of the problem with the path you went down was starting with our XDoclet web tutorial.

Well, my mistake then was to type “tutorial” into the search box on your site, and then take at face value the fact that there’s only one useful hit, which is the XDoclet tutorial. You’ll notice that the tutorial page http://www.myeclipseide.com/index.php?module=ContentExpress&func=display&ceid=16&meid=-1 only has one live link to any page with “tutorial” in it’s title….

Thanks for the URL to the simpler tutorial, I’ll give it a try.

Keith

[Scott Anderson]

Keith,

I understand. I didn’t mean to imply that starting there was your fault. We the ones that put it up in a very easy to find location on the site, while the product documentation is much harder to locate. I guess that’s because it was an interesting tutorial that was done by one of our users and answered a lot of questions that others were having as they tried to take full advantage of our XDoclet support. It’s always difficult to make sure everyone can find what they need when they need it.

–Scott
MyEclipse Support

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