27
2006
There’s a lot to love about Eclipse Web Tools Platform…(with screenshots)
An article by Glen
If you haven’t played with Eclipse WTP and you do web development… then today is your day to start. I’ve been using it for about a month now and I’ve gotta say I am totally impressed with it.
The WTP is a set of plugins for Eclipse 3.1 that gives you very neat stuff to make web development that much easier (things like syntax colouring and command completion for HTML, JSP, JSTL, Javascript, CSS). Anyways, here are a few of the things I just love about it…
First off the bat is css tag completion… I always forget these..
And the completion is smart about potential values too..
I’ve been doing a lot of ajax stuff lately with DWR, and the WTP Javascript completion is just great. Does completion for your own functions too..
Next big fave is the JSTL completion. First class.. just love it…
And if that’s not enough to love there’s also a stack of J2EE plugins to do stuff like EJB wizards, Web Services wizards, embeddable app servers and the like…
There are supposed to be ways to upgrade to WTP straight from Eclipse 3.1 Update Manager… but I never got it working… They offer an “all-in-one” download with Eclipse + all the WTP stuff in a single tarball which is what I eventually retreated to. It also motivated me to finally sort out how to install plugins properly so I don’t have to install them again every time I upgrade Eclipse.
Anyways… big fan of WTP.. and the stuff coming in 1.5 looks very cool (including JSF, WS-Security, and EJB3 tool support). Big props to the Eclipse WTP dudes. Great stuff.
About the Author: Glen Smith
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Glen Smith
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Once you figured out how to install plugins properly did you figure out how to install WTP w/out the all-in-one tarball? I had the same problem and did, like you, just installed the all-in-one, but I’d prefer to install Eclipse and then WTP on top of it.
Strange, the WTP update works fine for me, although admittedly, I’m currently using it with 3.2 rather than 3.1. Seem to remember it working on 3.1 too, though.
Did you get a particular problem?
Eric & Paul, thanks for your feedback.
Eric, the answer is no. Once I learned about handling plugins nicely, I tried a reinstall of base 3.1.2 and then tried setting up WTP into a plugin location. Still no cigar. That’s when I retreated to the all-in-one option.
Paul, the particular error I received was during the install process itself. One of the plugins late in the install just complained about an I/O error and bombed out of update manager. That was on a Win32 box.
On my Mac I managed to use Update Manager to go from 3.1.0 to 3.1.2 and then to WTP and it eventually worked (but I had to use the main eclipse site rather than a mirror for it to work).