Free Web Site Development Tool & Web Portal Software: The Eclipse project has been providing a high-quality, extensible IDE to the open source community for several years. Get a head start in using the new Eclipse plug-in for the development and deployment of Web applications on the Apache Geronimo server. Start your conversion from Tomcat today and leverage Geronimo for building Web site and portal site applications which includes J2EE support, xdoclet template features, and more.

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by Tim Francis, senior technical staff member, WebSphere Application Integration Middleware, IBM Corp. First published by IBM at IBM developerWorks Open Source (www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library). All rights retained by IBM and the author.

The Eclipse project has been providing a high-quality and extensible integrated development environment to the open source community for several years now. Get a head start in using the new Eclipse plug-in to develop and deploy Web applications to the Apache Geromimo server. IBM Senior Technical Staff Member Tim Francis walks you through the details.

Plug-ins add features to Eclipse
Many developers are attracted to the Eclipse platform because its core capability can be extended by additional features. Eclipse provides a well-defined mechanism for this extension ability. Every aspect of Eclipse is contained in a plug-in, and plug-ins can dynamically extend other plug-ins, as well as define extension points that allow other plug-ins to extend them. The plug-in itself defines the type of function that can be provided via these extensions, and not the basic Eclipse infrastructure. For example, the extension can be as simple as a new entry in a pop-up menu, or as comprehensive as a completely new type of project, or a series of editors and views.

Base Eclipse support includes the Java Development Tool, or JDT, which provides a complete Java development environment. However, a new Eclipse tools project known as the Web Tools Platform (WTP) was announced last year, with a goal of providing the base capabilities required to develop J2EE Web applications. IBM has donated a significant amount of code to this project, and several other companies are collaborating with its ongoing development. The first release of the WTP is scheduled to be available on July 29, 2005.

Although the WTP project does not provide advanced development capabilities or ease-of-use features that are available in modern commercial integrated development environments (such as IBM Rational® Application Developer), it does provide a common open source base that defines necessary underlying structures. This base includes the definition and structure of the base project types, the basic editors that can be used to modify the various artifacts, and the support for defining and interacting with application servers. (You can find more information about Eclipse and the Web Tools Platform in the Resources section later in this article).

The Web Tools Platform and Apache Geronimo
The WTP project currently provides support for deploying projects to several open source and Web application servers, including the Apache Tomcat servlet container. A new open source project being developed—Apache Geronimo—provides a complete application server, including not just the servlet container, but also support for messaging, a database including JDBC connectors, and a portal framework. A new plug-in for WTP is being developed and is available on the eclipse.org Web site; it provides integration between WTP and Apache Geronimo (see Resources for a link to the plug-in). This plug-in allows you to use WTP as a very basic development environment for creating, deploying, and debugging Geronimo applications.

Deploy and use the base WTP project
At the time of this writing, the M4 milestone of the WTP project has just been released, and is available for download (see Resources). As described in the eclipse.org overview of the project, a number of prerequisites are required to install the WTP, which you must download and install before you can install the WTP. These prerequisities include the base Eclipse driver and additional drivers for GEF, EMF, and the Java EMF model. Links for the correct version of all these files are available from eclipse.org (see Resources).

Download and unzip the base WTP project and the Geronimo plug-in:
After you have downloaded the prereqs and unzipped the base WTP project and the latest WTP milestone build, you can download the Geronimo plug-in. The plug-in will be available in future WTP builds, but for use with the WTP M4 driver, you can download the plug-in by itself (see Resources). Unzip this plug-in into the following location: eclipse/plugins/org.eclipse.jst.server.geronimo.core_1.0.0.

Start Eclipse:
The final step in the preparation process is to start Eclipse for the first time using the clean option, to ensure the new plug-in is recognized. Once you start Eclipse, you'll see a startup screen like this:

Figure 1. The Eclipse startup screen