Eclipse 3.6 Helios arrives. Plugin update support still needs work
The Eclipse projects yearly multi-project release is now available. It is code named Helios which replaces Galileo. The new eclipse version is 3.6.
One of the new features is an “easier” way to find and install plugins. (Help->Eclipse Marketplace…) Helios comes with a ton of plugins but not support for maven. sigh. So, OK, let’s use this easy plugin marketplace feature to find it and install it. You can limit the list displayed by category: database, build etc. Some of the plugins you see have an install button. Cool; that would be easy! No such luck for m2eclipse. You have to press the “learn more” link and go to their web page. Then you need to do the pre-Helios chacha. Find the update site URL, copy it, go to eclipse, Install new software, add new update site, select it, then install. And you still have to reboot Eclipse to get it working.
For m2eclipse here are the updates sites. Right, plural.
http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org/sites/m2e/0.10.2.20100623-1649/
http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org/sites/m2e-extras/
Maybe I’ll have a little better luck with Groovy. Nope. That’s even worse. Doing an “all marketplace” search yields nothing related. Same for Grails as a keyword. But hell, using the Helios update site you can install Fortran! Right. For-freaking-tran but not Groovy. To be fair, if you look at the canned update sites there is a disabled one for groovy – but it’s for version 3.5 and not 3.6.
Here are the Groovy update sites. (The web page is http://groovy.codehaus.org/Eclipse+Plugin)
http://dist.springsource.org/release/GRECLIPSE/e3.6/
http://dist.codehaus.org/groovy/distributions/greclipse/groovy-m2eclipse/
It’s worse for Grails support. You need STS installed first.
http://www.springsource.com/products/springsource-tool-suite-download
Then you need to install another plugin: http://www.grails.org/STS+Integration
Aarrrggghhh. Makes you want to use Netbeans.
Have fun trying out the search capabilities. You can do it from your browser here: http://marketplace.eclipse.org/
One last thing. If you want to install plugins from multiple update sites you have to do them a site at a time (and restart each time of course). You cannot select a plugin/update from one update site and another plugin/update from another site at once. Is that painful or what?
IceFaces is not actually a JSF implementation. It’s a JSF add-on (ajax component library and then some more). Apache MyFaces and Sun’s RI are the implementations.
I was consulting/contracting JSF full time for about two years, and saw relatively little evidence of IceFaces being used in the field. Thinking seemed to be: “JSF is complex enough as it is so we don’t want to add any extra stability-risking complexity on top”. This is not at all isolated to IceFaces, which may well be the best of the bunch, but all JSF Ajax stuff seems to be retrofits on top of a framework that simply was not designed for Ajax.
As of JSF itself; I’v moved to GWT about a year ago (and would NEVER move back to JSF), but to tell the truth JSF served me relatively well. Some architectural and design deficiencies are balanced by the wide industry adaptation.
JSF 2.0 is designed to support Ajax. The above comment is only true for JSF 1.x