I only played with Galileo for about 10 minutes and I am already very intrigued. Based on my last post, I wanted to see if I could get Ivy and Eclipse to work better together and explore the new features. The first difference appears to be the way that plug-ins are installed and managed. Eclipse 3.4 significantly changed the way plug-ins were installed and it looks like they are changed again. Plug-in management was never as smooth as NetBeans. NetBeans provides a fully integrated solution for searching through available plug-ins, with click and go installation. The new Eclipse implementation looks promising, maybe not as polished as NetBeans, but a step in the right direction. As shown to the right, you can now view all of the available plug-ins in a much more controlled and usable approach. Managing additional software sites is much cleaner than before too.
At first glance, there seems to be a lot of small, subtle changes, rather than any big, must have features. The Eclipse release process appears to be taking longer and longer; the first milestone release was last August! This is the first time I have not jumped on the milestone builds, preferring to stick with the Ganymede release for my daily usage. Another small change is the way the network proxy panel works; it actually seems more complicated than it was before! They finally added (or re-implemented) one on my favorite plug-ins, the “open implementation” option. How could that feature not been part of Eclipse before this? It is an absolute necessity when programming with Spring. Overall, I think Galileo looks a little more polished than before; I will st
art using it for my daily work and try to find more interesting new features to report on!
A new to me feature… After adding the IvyDE plug-in to Eclipse, the next step is to add the Ivy managed dependencies to the project. I found a new project properties panel, Java EE Module Dependencies. I thought this was a new feature, but it appears this feature was available in Eclipse 3.4 too. I hoped this was the answer to my Ivy problem! The panel allows you to pick other projects and/or their class path entries to be added as web library dependencies; it suggested that these dependencies would be resolved at deployment time. I gave it a try, but unfortunately it only half worked. The dependent project part worked perfect; making a JAR file out of the secondary project and copying it over to the exploded WAR’s WEB-INF/lib directory. This seems like a good solution when working with external projects, especially when you are activity integrating them into your primary project. The unfortunate part is that Eclipse still completely ignored the Ivy dependencies; not copying any of the Ivy resolved JAR files to the WEB-INF/lib directory. What a drag! I will have to continue my quest for a workable Ivy / WTP solution!
