Greg Stachnick's Blog

Now that Oracle Weblogic Server 11gR1 (10.3.1) is available to the general public, Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse 11g users can already start building and migrating applications over to the new server. To start using Weblogic Server 11gR1 with OEPE, simply create a new server configuration (right-click the Servers view and select New > Server). The Weblogic Server 11gR1 server adapter is located under the Oracle folder.

Navigate to the Weblogic Server 11gR1 installation directory and point to your domain or create a new domain.

Once your server configuration is defined, you can start associating projects with the new server. (right-click the server config and select Add and Remove Projects..).

Congratulations! Now that the server is configured, you can start running, publishing, and debugging your applications to a local or remote Weblogic Server 11gR1 instance.

Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse 11g is now live and ready for download.

This release is a significant enhancement over OEPE 1.0 with new features supporting the following technologies:

JPA Support

New JPA entity generation and management tools, built on WTP Dali, are included for EclipseLink, Kodo, and generic JPA providers. These new tools provide entity generation wizards supporting both Top-Down (Start from Java) and Bottom-Up (Start from Schema) JPA entity development.

In addition, the Entities Editor graphically represents relationships between existing JPA entities in the project. Combined with the JPA Details view, the Entities Editor provides a single view to manage multiple JPA entities and their relationships.

Spring ORM Generation and SpringIDE

New Spring ORM Generation tools create Spring DAO and Service classes from existing entities. These Spring DAOs include standard CRUD operations for easy data access. SpringIDE is bundled and integrated with OEPE 11g providing enhanced editing and validation of Spring configuration files.

Oracle Database Tools

New Plugins for Oracle Database development, built on Eclipse DTP, are available in OEPE 11g.

JAX-WS Web Services Tools

New JAX-WS and JAXB development tools are included supporting both Top-Down (Start from Java) and Bottom-Up (Start from WSDL) web service development for Weblogic Server. These new tools includes features for Java Web Service and WSDL generation, client generation, JAXB types generation, testing with the Web Service Test Client, and deployment tools for Weblogic Server.

Support for Weblogic Server

Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse continues to provide tools for local and remote development, deployment, and debugging on Weblogic Server. OEPE 11g supports Weblogic Server value added features such as shared libraries, Fast Swap, deployment plans, and more.

OEPE 11g includes new editors for common Weblogic Server deployment descriptors, weblogic.xml and weblogic-application.xml. These new editors include wizards, validation, and code completion to streamline application configuration. Context sensitive help (hit the F1 key) has been added for every field in the editors to help users understand the semantics of these descriptors.

New Facets and Project Types

New facets and project wizards have been added to OEPE 11g in support of the new features mentioned above.

Oracle is very active this year at EclipseCon, participating in nine sessions, tutorials, short talks, and BOFs.

Here is a link to all of our session activity - Oracle EclipseCon 2009 Sessions

Pieter Humphrey and I will be presenting a tutorial session on JPA and EclipseLink development. We will be using the new Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse along with WTP to build a data driven style application. The session, entitled Advanced JPA (Java Persistence API) development lab - Dali futures sneak peek, is on Wednesday March 25th at 15:30 in Grand Ballroom E.

Swing by Booth 201 to get more information on Oracle's Eclipse based products and involvement in WTP. We will have demos, literature, and of course freebies.

I have received a few questions from new users who noted that the Eclipse CVS plugins appear to be missing from the full install of Oracle Workshop for Weblogic 10.3. Typically, the CVS plugins are shipped as part of the core Eclipse platform under the org.eclipse.team.* package. Although it appears the build of Eclipse 3.3 shipping with Workshop 10.3 is missing these plugins, it is easy enough to install them via the Europa Update Site.

To install the CVS plugins, follow these steps:

From within Workshop for Weblogic 10.3, go to Help > Software Updates > Find and Install..

Choose to Search for new features to install from the Europa Discovery Site

The CVS plugins can be found under the Collaboration Tools  category.

After the install, you may be asked to restart Workshop for Weblogic 10.3 before the plugins can be used.

In Workshop for Weblogic, we introduce Web Folder Mapping which seeks to broaden the types of project structures supported in the IDE. IDE’s supporting web development (including previous versions of Workshop ) often expect existing projects to conform to some sort of preferred project structure such as a WAR or EAR layout. Since only the runtime environments require a specific layout, many development teams choose to create an application using their own structure at design time and then construct and deploy the WAR/EAR during the build.

Through Web Folder Mapping, Workshop for Weblogic removes this IDE restriction by allowing you to map your design time project structure to the layout that would exist at runtime.

Typical Use Cases

In Workshop, web project setup now falls into two types of scenarios when working with existing projects. The first case is the traditional exploded WAR layout. This type of layout has been supported in all previous versions of Workshop and works by either enabling AppXRay on the project, assuming the project exists in the workspace, or importing the existing web application into Eclipse through the project creation wizards.

Web applications that do not conform to an exploded WAR structure and/or are spread out across multiple projects are setup just like any other project but include the additional step of mapping the project folders to their associated web application URI’s.

Setting up Web Folder Mapping

The following example project uses a non-WAR layout and has dependencies in a second project. In this case, the common JSP includes, images, and Struts actions are organized in a different project.

When we enable AppXRay on the project, the Web Folder Mapping wizard enables us to link the design time project structure to the structure that would exist at runtime.

Notice that the conf directory houses the deployment descriptors like web.xml struts-config.xml. At runtime these directories would likely reside in /WEB-INF.

Once the project folders have been mapped, all Workshop features, like AppXRay, WYSIWYG page construction, smart editors, and wizards, are available.

In this example, Struts actions configuration files are defined in both projects. AppXplorer consolidates the actions into a single list yet when we create a new action, we control where the new code resides.

Running with Weblogic Server Split Source

In addition to the support that web folder mapping brings to the IDE environment, we are also able to take this project and debug it on Weblogic Server without having to reorganize or repackage. This is because the web folder mapping information supports Weblogic Server’s split source feature.

Notice that the mapped project is running directly from the workspace onto Weblogic Server 9.2.

When debugging a JSP, the breakpoint maps back to the page source in the appropriate project.