Eclipse Plug-in Development

This morning when I opened my Eclipse workspace, one of my RCP projects had problems with its build paths.  On the 'libraries' property page, the entry that is normally called 'Plug-in Dependencies' was labelled 'org.eclipse.pde.core.requiredPlugins (unbound)' and the container was empty.  After much experimenting, I discovered I could fix the problem by closing and re-opening the project, followed by a 'clean'.

My workbench showed errors on start-up:

Error 2006-01-12 08:07:48.184 An internal error occurred during: "Initializing Java tooling".
java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.eclipse.emf.common.notify.impl.BasicNotifierImpl.eNotify(BasicNotifierImpl.java:229)
at org.eclipse.wst.common.internal.emf.resource.TranslatorResourceImpl.setID(TranslatorResourceImpl.java:310)
...[snip]...

Error 2006-01-12 08:07:48.169 Problems occurred when invoking code from plug-in: "org.eclipse.core.resources".
java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 4
at org.eclipse.emf.common.notify.impl.BasicNotifierImpl.eNotify(BasicNotifierImpl.java:229)
at org.eclipse.emf.common.notify.impl.NotificationImpl.dispatch(NotificationImpl.java:931)
at org.eclipse.wst.common.componentcore.internal.impl.ComponentResourceImpl.setComponent(ComponentResourceImpl.java:216)
at org.eclipse.wst.common.componentcore.internal.impl.ResourceTreeNode.findMatchingVirtualPathsSet(ResourceTreeNode.java:210)
...[snip]...

Warning 2006-01-12 08:07:39.347 A workspace crash was detected. The previous session did not exit normally.

although as far as I can remember the previous session did exit normally.

Eclipse JST Web Services

I tried to use the Eclipse JST wizard to generate a web service.  I kept getting the error:

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: javax/activation/DataSource

whenever during WSDL generation (or parsing).  A Google search revealed that this is a very common problem -- see, for example, Eclipse Bugzilla 104993.  I couldn't find a solution on the Web, but I discovered that if I added activation.jar from the JavaBean Activation Framework to my project build path, everything worked.  I had to exit and re-enter Eclipse for the change to work.  Also, I found that after I had run the wizard successfully once, it worked forever more (i.e. without having to add activation.jar to a project, and in following Eclipse sessions).  Something is being cached somewhere.

Wink

I found some nice screencasting freeware called Wink.  It creates Flash, HTML, or PDF presentations from screen captures.

Eclipse RCP vs RCP SDK

If you use the Eclipse RCP binary instead of the RCP SDK, there are various problems in the development environment.  Many of the plug-in property pages were truncated, displaying only the top few widgets (and cutting off the last widget shown).  Also, the extensions panel was not showing the various extension attribute types under the 'New' context menu (e.g. category, view, and stickyView were not available for extensions of type org.eclipse.ui.views).