What is Callisto?

Callisto is a coordinated release of 10 projects for Eclipse that greatly simplify the process of getting Eclipse up and going so you can do what you want to do. Callisto isn't a different, customized version of Eclipse V3.2, nor is it a replacement of the projects included when you go to the Eclipse Callisto Discovery Site. Using the Callisto Discovery Site, it's easy to get all the projects you need for Web or Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) development without having to search for each plug-in and install it separately because the plug-ins are sorted by the type of activity they enable.

Because it makes getting Eclipse tailored to your needs a simple task, the Callisto Discovery Site is a welcome addition in Eclipse V3.2.

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About the Callisto Discovery Site

The Callisto Discovery Site provides an easy way to access plug-ins from several projects by going to one location. The projects included in the Callisto Discovery Site are the Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) Project, the C/C++ IDE Data Tools Platform, the Eclipse Modeling Framework, the Graphical Editor Framework, the Graphical Modeling Framework, the Eclipse Platform, the Eclipse Test & Performance Tools Platform, the Web Tools Platform, and the Visual Editor. The projects are organized under similar names that are more descriptive of the type of work the projects enable you to do. This article provides an overview of the projects in several task areas, including:

• C and C++ development
• Charting and reporting
• Database development
• Enabling features
• Graphical editors and frameworks
• Java development
• Models and model development
• Testing and performance
• Web and J2EE development

Before you download Eclipse, if you haven't already, look at the categories and note which task(s) you perform on a day-to-day basis. This will help you install the correct plug-ins.

New features

In addition to the easier method of finding and installing Eclipse plug-ins, Eclipse V3.2 offers many new features -- too many to cover here. You can find a link to the full list in Resources.

Of the new and noteworthy features in Eclipse V3.2 (as listed on the Eclipse Web site), this article covers platform and Java features briefly. The platform features are improvements in the Eclipse V3.2 development platform, so you get the benefits regardless of what plug-ins you choose to install.

Platform features

Many of the platform features are good steps forward in general usability of the Eclipse interface. At the top of this list are a new Project Explorer, a combined history view, better filtering through working sets and dynamic filters, better help in dialogs, and linked resources. Many more features have been introduced, as well (see Resources).

The new Project Explorer organizes project resources in a way that makes sense for the type of project. In Java projects, the view looks mostly like the Package Explorer. In other projects, like Web projects, the Project Explorer organizes the resources differently from the Navigator View.

Have you ever said to yourself, "Hey, I had this working five minutes ago," then resorted to looking at the differences between your local code and the code in the source repository to find out what you changed? If so, the ability to view Combined History helps a lot because it combines the local history of your changes with history from a source repository, such as Concurrent Versions System (CVS). This is a wonderful feature because you can track your changes better and locate issues more quickly by seeing your local changes over time.

Filtering by working sets itself isn't a new feature, but the ability to do it in almost any window is an improvement over previous versions of Eclipse. If you haven't set up working sets, you may want to try it. They make it easier to find files you're looking for by letting you filter out the ones you don't care about. If a huge project has many packages, but I'm working on and care about only a few, then I create working sets to show only the packages I need. It's also possible to set up working sets by file types. So if you're working only with static HTML pages in a Web project, you can make a working set to display just those pages.

Better help has been added to the dialog boxes throughout Eclipse, along with the Cheat Sheet view, which you can use to keep the help window open while you're working through wizards or steps to create a project.

With linked resources, you can now add links to files inside your project without copying the file into your workspace. This can be handy to avoid copying the same files into many workspaces.

Along with the many platform improvements for V3.2, numerous features and enhancements have been made for Java development. This article discusses some of them; for an in-depth list, see Resources.

Java features

Improvements have made it easier to be more productive when you're doing Java development. Most notable, aside from full Java V6.0 support, are the refactoring improvements -- such as the ability to do superclass refactoring, a new clean-up wizard, and refactoring history. Features you can use to pound out better code more quickly include things like the Surround With menu and help for catching null references.

Superclass refactoring provides a handy ability to select one or more sibling classes and then instantiate the superclass wizard, which looks through the classes and finds common properties and methods you can consolidate into a superclass. Eclipse writes the superclass automagically with its new methods and alters the sibling classes to use the new superclass.

The new clean-up wizard brings your Java code up to snuff by doing things like adding brackets around single-line if or while conditions (or not -- it's an option), adding this to setters and getters, surrounding multiple conditions in if statements with parentheses, removing unnecessary import statements and private members, and more.

Using refactoring history, you can capture all your refactoring changes. That way, if something breaks (which it won't because you're writing really good unit tests, right?), you can look at the refactoring history and see what happened.

The Surround With menu lets you easily wrap lines of code you've written with try ... catch, for, and while loops. You can define the templates for the blocks, so the code can include any customized features you use in your enterprise -- like custom exception handling.

Finally, say goodbye to the dull, everyday drudgery of null reference exceptions. Or at least plan to see fewer of them. Under Java Compiler > Errors/Warnings in the project preferences, you can tell Eclipse to warn you if you're accessing methods on objects that can only be null. If you're the type who ignores all the warnings, you can even tell Eclipse to use errors, instead.

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Installing Callisto

To install Eclipse V3.2 and start installing plug-ins from the Callisto Discovery Site:

1. Download the latest version of the V3.2.x Eclipse software development kit (SDK). As of the time of this writing, the latest and greatest version is Eclipse V3.2.1 (see Resources).
2. After you download the file, extract it into any directory. On a Windows® computer, that can be C:\Program Files or any other directory appropriate for applications. On a Mac, the Applications folder is a suitable place for the extracted folder.
3. Once the Eclipse files are extracted into a directory, you can start Eclipse by double-clicking the eclipse.exe file or the Eclipse icon.
4. When Eclipse starts for the first time or opens a new workspace, it displays a Welcome view that you can use to go through tutorials, get extra help, or view samples. Click the Workbench icon to go straight to using Eclipse. You can always see the Welcome view later by selecting the Help > Welcome menu item.

Adding features

To add new features to Eclipse, notably from the Callisto Discovery Site:

1. Go to Help > Software Updates > Find and Install.
2. From Install/Update, select Search for new features to install, and click Next.
3. Select the Callisto Discovery Site from the list of sites to include in the search. Click Finish to start the search for features.
4. From Updates, select the features to install and click Next. If you get a warning about missing dependencies, click Select Required to have Eclipse automatically sort out your dependencies for you. After you click Next, you're prompted to read license agreements and agree to them or disagree, then to proceed with the actual installation.

As in previous versions of Eclipse, you can add new sites to install other features.

Graphical Editors and Frameworks

The Visual Editor included in Graphical Editors and Frameworks provides the ability to graphically design a Java rich client user interface, making it much easier to design a rich client application that uses the Java programming language. Before you can use the Visual Editor (VE), you need to install it from the Callisto Discovery Site.

As they say on TV, "actual results may vary," but lately, I've been selecting a high-level category, such as Graphical Editors and Frameworks, and clicking Select Required to have Eclipse sort out the dependencies. I've had no issues that way. It could be that I end up with a plug-in installed occasionally that I'll never use. But these plug-ins aren't huge, and aside from my music library, I have more than enough disk space. But if you're tight on space, you may want to spend the extra time to deselect the plug-ins you know you won't use, provided you aren't removing dependencies.

After installing the Graphical Editors and Frameworks, you have a few new options available when you're creating a new Java class. Figure 1 shows a list of your options to add a new Java component before installing the Graphical Editors and Frameworks plug-ins.

Figure 2 shows the list after the plug-ins have been installed.

In addition to the Visual Class Wizard, there are four new folders: AWT, RCP, Swing, and SWT. Each contains its own wizards to create different types of visual classes, such as applets, JApplets, JFrames, Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) shells, and more.

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Web and J2EE Development

Many capabilities are added when you install the Web and J2EE Development plug-ins from the Callisto Discovery Site. The plug-ins are provided by the Web Tools Platform (WTP) project and include the Web Standard Tools (WST) and J2EE Standard Tools (JST).

Not only do the plug-ins included in the WST allow the development of static HTML pages and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) pages, but they also provide the ability to create and edit XML documents, XML Schema Infoset Model (XSDs), and Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLTs). Using the plug-ins, you can also develop your own Web Services Description Languages (WSDLs) from scratch or generate them from Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) registries.

The plug-ins from the JST project provides the ability to build JSPs, tag libraries, and servlets, and to deploy these files in Web Archive (WAR) files. Finally, using the plug-ins available in the JST, you can build Java-based Web services.

Figure 3 shows a few of the additional wizards installed with the Web and J2EE Development plug-ins. The new folders for Web and J2EE development are Eclipse Modeling Framework, EJB, J2EE and Web. The folders contain different wizards that allow you to create projects for dynamic Web development.

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Database Development

The plug-ins under Database Development provide the ability to work with databases. Figure 4 shows the Data Source Explorer, displayed in the Database Development perspective. Using it, you can connect to any database that supports a Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) connection and browse the database schema to view tables, functions, stored procedures, and other aspects of the database.

After adding a connection profile, you can add SQL files and associate them with the connection profiles. You can execute the SQL by using the context-sensitive menus to execute either the entire file or just the highlighted text. The results of running the SQL commands are displayed in the lower right-hand corner of the integrated development environment (IDE) by default.

If you have many SQL statements in a single file, the Outline view is also handy. You can select one of the items in the Outline view and execute it by choosing Execute Selected from the context menu.

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Charting and reporting

The Business Intelligence Reporting Tools (BIRT) plug-in allows you to develop business reports from data. A default, embedded Derby database comes with the plug-ins so you can quickly design a sample report and get a feel for how the tools work if you're not familiar with them.

I was able to build a report quickly that prints out the entire contents of the ORDER table included in the sample database. Figure 5 shows an example of this simple report, which is the entire dataset printed out to a paged report.

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Testing and Performance

The Testing and Performance plug-in doesn't add wizards to create new projects or files like those that many of the other plug-ins do. Instead, it provides the ability to profile your application and report on what it finds while it's profiling.

You can use the new button that appears next to the Run button to start the profiling process (see Figure 6). Alternatively, you can begin profiling by selecting the Run > Profile menu option.

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Summary

Eclipse V3.2 has many new features over V3.1, and the Callisto Discovery Site is a welcome addition to Eclipse that makes it easier to locate and download plug-ins that enable different types of database development. The future coordinated releases of the 10 projects in Callisto is encouraging because it will maintain the stability of the Eclipse platform and to allow users to easily update the IDE.

This article provided a quick high-level overview of many of the projects included in the Callisto release of Eclipse, as well as some of the platform improvements. If you haven't already begun to develop with Eclipse, now is a great time to take advantage of these improvements. If you're running older versions of Eclipse or an IDE, you should begin evaluating the feasibility and benefits of upgrading or migrating to Eclipse V3.2 Callisto.

Resources

Learn

• See Eclipse 3.2 -- New and Noteworthy to learn what's new in the latest version.
  
  
• Check out the Eclipse wiki for information about Eclipse, Callisto releases, and included projects.
  
  
• Visit the Eclipse Visual Editor Project for more information.
  
  
• Check out the Eclipse WTP Project to learn more about Web Standard Tools (WST) and J2EE Standard Tools (JST).
  
  
• Visit Eclipse.org's Data Tools Platform (DTP) to learn more about the project.
  
  
• Get more information about Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT).
  
  
• Be sure to check out Eclipse Test & Performance Tools Platform (TPTP) Project.
  
  
• Stay current with developerWorks' Technical events and webcasts.
  
  
• Visit Safari Books Online for a wealth of resources for open source technologies.
  
  
• Expand your Eclipse skills by checking out IBM developerWorks' Eclipse project resources.
  
  
• For an excellent introduction to the Eclipse platform, read "Getting started with the Eclipse Platform."
  
  
• developerWorks podcasts include interesting interviews and discussions for software developers.
  
  
• Visit the developerWorks Open source zone for extensive how-to information, tools, and project updates to help you develop with open source technologies and use them with IBM's products.
  
  

Get products and technologies

• Visit Eclipse.org for more information about Eclipse and to download the latest version.
  
  
• Check out the Callisto Simultaneous Release project downloads.
  
  
• Check out the latest Eclipse technology at IBM alphaWorks.
  
  
• Innovate your next open source development project with IBM trial software, available for download or on DVD.
  
  

Discuss

• The Eclipse newsgroups offer many resources for people interested in using and extending Eclipse.
  
  
• Get involved in the developerWorks community by participating in developerWorks blogs.
  
  

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Table of contents

• What is Callisto?
• About the Callisto Discovery Site
• New features
• Installing Callisto
• Adding features
• Graphical Editors and Frameworks
• Web and J2EE Development
• Database Development
• Charting and reporting
• Testing and Performance
• Summary
• Resources
• About the author
• Comments

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