I’ve updated our Eclipse plugin to fix bugs, add a couple of features, and generally improve the user experience. It’s up in a snapshot now on our Eclipse update site: http://caucho.com/eclipse. Just add this to the software repositories in your Eclipse set up. The changes include:

• Bug fixes (esp. debug handling)
• Better handling of Resin configuration files
• Support for deploying to a temporary directory

Bug fixes

The main bug fix is debug handling. Instead of launching the watchdog as in normal Resin deployments, we now launch Resin directly. We also now respect the HTTP port that you specify. The port issue is actually related more to configuration file handling, which I’ll address next…

Better handling of Resin configuration files

In this version of the plugin, configuration is now handled in unified way. All configuration for the servers are linked (or copied, at your option) into the Workspace under a “Servers” folder. This way you can see exactly which configuration file you’re running with and even edit it from Eclipse. Our new dialog box for configuring the server lets you specify the Resin home (where the Resin server files, e.g. the resin.jar), the Resin root directory, a server address and port, and which Resin configuration file you want.

The options for the last bit are to choose the very basic configuration that’s included with the plugin itself, to use the configuration in the “conf” subdirectory of the Resin home, or to specify a configuration somewhere else in the file system (e.g. /etc/resin). If you’re starting a new project and don’t need to do anything fancy, I recommend just using the first option, copying the configuration from the plugin. If you do need to use a custom configuration, you may need to modify it to recognize the variables that the plugin sets at runtime. The dialog box tells you what these variables are and how to set them, depending on which server profile you use.

Support for deploying to a temporary directory

The last round of the plugin added support for doing hot deploy via Resin 4’s new deploy service and in-place deployment where your app is run directly from the project directory. Of course, the standard deploy method where you create a war and copy it to the Resin root webapp deploy directory was always supported. Now we added a requested feature to create a temporary directory to which the webapp is deployed. This directory is deleted when Eclipse is shut down.

Feedback

This is a snapshot release, but I did fairly thorough testing on it, so now I’ll need users to let me know of any problems. Our bug tracker is here: http://bugs.caucho.com/, so please file any issues that arise. Feel free to post feature requests there as well, though those might have to wait until the next release cycle in 8 weeks or so.

Tags: eclipse, resin

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 at 6:20 pm and is filed under Engineering. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.