2Paths Team Blog

2Paths Eclipse Distro v2
I’ve put together a new disto of the latest Eclipse wtp with some added plugin goodness. I’ve found this version to be much more stable than v1, and it even works on Lorill’s machine without too much trouble. Among the new features is a regex tester plugin, and a filter plugin that allows you to run command line tools such as sed against a selection in the text editor.

Also note that I’ve put together a 2Paths preferences file that remaps the home and end keys in eclipse, and adds in the 2Paths code formatting templates. To import, once you’ve got the new eclipse up and running, select import and choose preferences.

Download Eclipse 2Paths Edition v2 (155.6MB)

Fix for home and end keys
If you’re anything like me, you are used to having your home and end keys go to the start of the line of text and the end of the line, respectively. The way OS X does it drives me insane, and I’ve finally found a solution that even fixes it in firefox: KeyFixer.

KeyFixer is a free utility that remaps those keys, there are 2 versions, the standard one that remaps it in OS X and most apps, and KeyFixer for Firefox which is self explanatory. I recommend installing them both if you want your home and end keys back.

Download KeyFixer (60KB)

Download KeyFixer for Firefox (80KB)

The Eclipse WebTools team has released version 2.0 of the WebTools Platform along with the rest of the Europa release. From the release announcement:

Eclipse developers will be particularly pleased with the debut of major features and/or specification updates to EJB3 JPA, JSP 2.0, JSF 1.2, Axis2 Web Services, Tomcat support, and source editing. This release also introduces Java EE 5 project support.

I’ve put together a new Eclipse bundle for everyone here at 2Paths. The package includes some useful plugins preinstalled (Subclipse, SpringIDE 2.0., JAutoDoc, and JSEclipse), as well as some performance and stability tweaks.

Download - Eclipse Europa 2Paths Edition (OS X, 155MB)

To ensure everyone is working with the same tools, you should configure your eclipse to automatically check for updates. This can be done by clicking on the Eclipse menu -> Preferences then Install/Update -> Automatic Updates.

If anyone has any problems with this release, just let me know and I can give you a hand getting things sorted out.

I’ve downloaded and hand-configured the latest Eclipse WTP builds for your convenience. I’d included the Subclipse SVN plugin as well. If there are any other plugins you’d like to see by default in the future, let me know.

First of all, if you haven’t installed this update to the Java SWT libraries from Apple, do it now. It should improve stability with Eclipse.

Download: SWT Compatibility Update (188KB)

Eclipse WTP 1.5.4 is the latest update to the WTP 1.5 line. Not anything new, but contains numerous bug fixes etc.

Download: Eclipse WTP 1.5.4 (183.9MB)

Eclipse WTP 2.0 RC1 is based on Eclipse 3.3 RC1 and appears to be fairly stable. Some of the new features are support for Tomcat 6, support for JPA projects (annotations, , mappings etc), built in support for web services, and spell checking. This is pre-release, so use at your own risk (I’ve been using it and it seems ok, although I keep my 1.5.4 around just incase).

Download: Eclipse WTP 2.0RC1 (227MB)

Remember to update your copy of eclipse regularly to receive the latest bugfixes, or better yet, set it to auto update in preferences.

I was messing around with some of the sample Dashboard widget code provided by Apple and came up with a widget that displays the latest entries on the 2Paths blog. Widgets are basically html + css + javascript, with a little ajax mixed in if desired, and as such they’re pretty simple to create and modify. The nice thing about coding them versus something you would access in your browser is that Dashboard is a known variable; you don’t need to worry about what it’s going to look like in 5 different browsers.

On a side note, The Daily Grind is a time tracking widget that allows you to track the amount of time you’ve spent on a number of different tasks/projects. It wouldn’t take a lot of work to interface it with JIRA for our time tracking.

Download: 2Paths Blog Widget (584KB)