Friday, June 17, 2011

Java EE Module Configuration Editors Draft Proposal

I am working on a proposal for Java EE Module Configuration Editors project. The goal is to create a new project under WTP Java EE Tools project and build there editors for web.xml, application.xml, ejb-jar.xml and possibly all the rest of the module configuration files. The editors would be built using Sapphire and work across various versions of Java EE spec. For Java EE 5 or newer, the editors would be able to also edit Java annotations instead of the XML configuration file from the same interface.

Draft Proposal

While I am working on the getting the new project created to hold this work, I’ve started implementing the web.xml editor in Sapphire repository as a sample. You can get a feel for what’s there now and what the final result will look like in the screencast that I put together.

Screencast

To take the editor for a spin yourself, install everything from the following repository. Don't try to go to a newer build as this plugin has been removed from the Sapphire build in preparation for the 0.3 release.

https://hudson.eclipse.org/hudson/job/sapphire-0.3.x/408/artifact/build/repository/

To access the source code, point your Eclipse at the following location in CVS. Note that you will need WTP + Sapphire in your target platform and Sapphire SDK in your dev eclipse. The latter part is very important as the Sapphire SDK contains the code generate necessary to build this plugin.

Source Code

If you are interested in this work, leave a comment with your name on this blog post or send a note to wtp-dev mailing list so that I can add you to the list of interested parties in the project proposal. If you are interested in helping to implement these editors, state as much as well and we will discuss.

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