Much ado about scripting, Linux & Eclipse: card subject to change

2008-07-05

Visual Editor for Eclipse 3.4 Ganymede

There have been a number of questions in eclipse.newcomer lately about the availability of a visual editor for Eclipse 3.4 Ganymede.

So, I thought I'd see if VE 1.3 can be installed into Ganymede using p2 -- and in fact it's pretty easy to do.

As noted in VE Installation Guide, you can use the "Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers"... but because I usually run with the Eclipse SDK, rather than an EPP bundle, I wanted to know what the minimum requirements are for VE, so I unpacked VE into Eclipse's new dropins/ folder, and started Eclipse with the OSGi console active, using this script:

#!/bin/bash
workspace=/tmp/workspace-clean-34
pushd ~/eclipse/34clean >/dev/null
if [[ $# -eq 0 ]]; then
        rm -fr eclipse $workspace emf-unpacked
        eclipse=eclipse-SDK-3.4-linux-gtk.tar.gz
        echo "Unpack $eclipse...";
        tar xzf $eclipse
        ve=org.eclipse.visualeditor-1.3.0.200709121813
        echo "Unpack ${ve}.zip into dropins"
        unzip -q ${ve}.zip -d eclipse/dropins/ve
        mv eclipse/dropins/ve/$ve eclipse/dropins/ve/eclipse
fi

vm=/opt/sun-java2-5.0/bin/java
echo "Using vm=$vm and workspace=$workspace"; 
./eclipse/eclipse -vm $vm -data $workspace \
  -consolelog -clean -debug -console -noexit -vmargs \
  -Xms128M -Xmx256M -XX:PermSize=128M -XX:MaxPermSize=256M
popd >/dev/null
What I found was that the console listed all the missing dependencies for the VE feature, making it easy to find the features I needed to install to fully enable VE. I fired up the Help > Software Updates and installed the following from the Ganymede Update Site:

On restart, I had a working visual editor:

12 comments:

ZiglioNZ said...

Indeed P2 is quite an improvement!

Could you try creating a ViewPart for a PDE plug-in? it doesn't work for me with the VE version I've got (all the rest does).
I'm using the version of VE provided by Yves YANG http://www.soyatec.com

nickb said...

Can you detail the steps you followed? I've tried creating a plugin project using the "with a view" template, but when I open the SampleView class w/ the visual editor, I get a NPE:

java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.eclipse.ve.internal.swt.ControlManager.refreshImage(ControlManager.java:934)
at org.eclipse.ve.internal.rcp.WorkbenchPartProxyAdapter.refreshImage(WorkbenchPartProxyAdapter.java:493)
at org.eclipse.ve.internal.cde.core.ImageFigureController.setImageNotifier(ImageFigureController.java:174)
at org.eclipse.ve.internal.rcp.WorkbenchPartGraphicalEditPart.activate(WorkbenchPartGraphicalEditPart.java:170)
at org.eclipse.gef.editparts.AbstractEditPart.activate(AbstractEditPart.java:152)
...

(This occurs with the latest binary VE build from ehecht, dated, 1.3.0.v200805121900.)

ZiglioNZ said...

Same... for some reasons creating classes that extend ViewPart causes an exception.
But I have no problems with creating normal SWT panels. So I create them indipendently with VE and then I manually insert them in a ViewPart that I open with the normal editor, not VE.

nickb said...

Sounds like something that the VE team ought to weigh in on. Please open a bug.

ZiglioNZ said...

Done, https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=239736#c0

It's my first bug report, so I hope I've provided enough info

Paul said...

I have been trying to get VE (lin_mac 1.4 version) to work on Ganymede installed on Ubuntu x86_64 with no success. I tried following both the instructions here and on the wiki. Eclipse appears to be ignoring VE's existence in the dropins directory. I even tried copying the jars/directories to the features/plugins directories. Any suggestions?

nickb said...

Could be a conflict between 32- and 64-bit libraries -- in theory, you need a 64-bit version of VE.

Have you tried a 32-bit Eclipse?

Paul said...

I haven't. I'll see what I come up with. I did get a little further. I had a package conflict that was preventing the VE installation from completing. It at least shows up in my installed packages list now. However, I still don't see an entry for the editor under Preferences. Working on resolving some other possible conflicts first.

Paul said...

Well, something appears to be a problem with the 1.4 build. I was able to get the build from May to work. Thanks for your time.

Unknown said...

Found this VE packaged version for 3.4 Ganymede. Seems to work fine for me:

http://ehecht.com/eclipse_ve/ve.html

Eko said...

thx for the last post. i'll test it.

nickb said...

Actually, we have something much newer - I've been remiss in not posting an update.

Latest downloads, for Eclipse 3.4+:

http://download.eclipse.org/tools/ve/downloads/drops/1.4.0/

Latest updates, for Eclipse 3.4+:

http://download.eclipse.org/tools/ve/updates/1.4/