File this one under “silly me”. I was having a heck of a time getting Eclipse 3.3 to find the Glassfish plugin automatically (or even manually) as described in the install guide.
I am sometimes behind a corporate proxy server, but I had the proxy set up in Eclipse when I was trying this, and I was seeing other app servers show up in the “Download additional server adapters” dialog.
Turns out that about half of the server adapter sites serve up their updates via HTTP (Geronimo, IBM, Pramati, and Eclipse proper). The rest use HTTPS (BEA, Glassfish, SAP). This can be determined by opening org.eclipse.wst.server.ui_1.0.205.v20070912.jar, or the equivalent on your version of Eclipse/WTP, and looking at serverAdapterSites.xml. For the curious, you can view the contents of this file in the Eclipse CVS repository.
All I had to do once I figured this out was to update my Eclipse proxy settings to use the same proxy for HTTPS that I was using for HTTP. It’s unfortunate that one doesn’t get any error or warning messages when this happens!
Hopefully this helps anyone else trying to get this installed from behind a proxy.
I was recently checking out the sample applications that ship with Spring Web Flow 2.0. In order to build the examples, you have to run an ant build that involves the Ivy Dependency Manager.
I was doing this behind a proxy server which requires username/password authentication, which unfortunately isn’t documented in the Ivy FAQ.
In case anyone runs into this particular problem, here’s how I solved it. Set the following environment variable (note this is all on a single line - I’ve added line breaks for readability):
set ANT_OPTS=-Dhttp.proxyHost=myproxyhost
-Dhttp.proxyPort=8080
-Dhttp.proxyUserName=myproxyusername
-Dhttp.proxyPassword=myproxypassword
-Dhttps.proxyHost=myproxyhost
-Dhttps.proxyPort=8080
Replace as appropriate for your environment.
Recently, while working on a customer’s older EJB 2-based system, I was going a bit nutty having to run a 1-2 minute ant build to execute various code generation tasks (anyone have fond memories of ejbgen like I do? 
)
I was able to get Eclipse set up to be happy with the relatively complex build structure, and happily discovered the “Ant Builder” capability of Eclipse, which allows ant build tasks to be inserted into the Eclipse build process. Tying this external build process into the IDE helped improve my efficiency while working on this complex project. I’ll go over here briefly how you can use this feature through an illustrative example.
Continue reading “Quick Tip: Using “Ant Builder” to customize Eclipse builds using ant scripts”
