I’ve long resisted MyEclipse; I always thought that I could assemble the Eclipse plug-ins myself. But after feeling a bit jealous watching some of my co-workers demonstrate the power of MyEclipse 4.0, I decided to take the plunge and hop on board the MyEclipse train, using it for development of Spring-Struts-Hibernate web application. It’s gone pretty well, but I have run into a few issues.
Armed with Voodoo Pad (an awesome wiki-like tool for the Mac), I recorded the issues I encountered along with their solutions. Here’s a short list from my first day’s experience.
- Don’t use the MySQL 3.0.8 Connector/J driver. Instead use version 3.1.10. You will not be able to establish a connection in the DatabaseExplorer using the old driver.
- If MyEclipse shows an error in your applicationContext.xml file, go into Project > Properties > MyEclipse-Spring. Remove the existing spring beans files; then add them back and it should resolve the issue.
- Adding “Spring Capabilities” (as defined out-of-the-box) doesn’t add the spring-hibernate.jar. You will need to add this file manually to your WEB-INF/lib.
- If you do not specify the “class” for an element in your struts-config.xml (e.g. when you are using Spring’s DelegatingRequestProcessor), the MyEclipse Struts designer will not automatically draw a line, representing a local forward, from the action to the JSP.
- If using multiple related Spring configuration files (e.g. applicationContext.xml and action-servlet.xml) you must define those as a “Config Set” in your MyEclipse-Spring project properties; otherwise, MyEclipse will complain that it can find references between the files.
Overall, I am very pleased with MyEclipse; I have found it to be comparable to the Eclipse Web Tools Platform; plus it has built in support for Hibernate, Spring, and Struts. When you do run into problems, the MyEclipse forums are a great way to track down those pesky problems.
Feel free to add your own MyEclipse tips …
Related link: Barlow Response: DC School System
Greg Barlow, CIO of the DC School System, responded to one of my harsh blog posts. From his response, it is clear that if there was mismangement it wasn’t his own - he’s been there less than one month. It appears that he inherited this mess from the previous manager.
“Before you get too harsh, you may want to know that I have been here less than one month. I was brought in to look at such issues and make corrections as necessary. Unsupported environments in mission critical applications are usually not where you want to be.” - Greg Barlow
Good Luck, Mr. Barlow. I’m sure you never wrote that letter thinking that it would be released to the Washington Post, and I’m sure that you’ll have a chance to clean up. New CIOs always have a delicate balancing act between effecting real change and dealing with entrenched interest. I hope that after this fiasco the school board and superintendent are giving you full latitude to make the necessary staffing and technology changes.
I’ve seen academic computing environments and I know that technology in the academic setting is a catch 22. With limited budgets, it is almost impossible to retain the best, and, even with dramatic educational discounts, critical turnkey software packages still cost a tremendous amount of money. School boards and those tasked with oversight are more often interested in doling out work to political allies. I’m sure you can’t tell us who was really responsible for this failure, but I’ll assume you are part of the solution.
Related link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/09/AR2005090901866.…
Wash post article on the DC school computing debacle. Sounds like the DC Schools CIO has decided to start blaming Apache 2.0 on Windows instead of fixing what is most likely a poorly designed system. If you are familiar with the technology, you know that the following paragraph is a common “cover your a**”, “grabbing for any excuse instead of admitting incompetence” trick. Read on for some good quotes…
Dang! Oracle and Microsoft? DC schools must be paying a hefty price for this chance at failure.
Related link: https://www.discursive.com
As promised, the code for drawing graphs from the O’Reilly Connection FOAF documents is available. The Subversion repository linked to below contains a very straightforward Python script which can be used to generate dot files for Graphviz. I’ve applied the Apache Software License 2.0, so feel free to do what you will with this logic. Read on for SVN repository URL…
Python is to Ruby as Java is to….
