mobile and gis dev notes » eclipse

Aptana Impressions

rupert — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 17:25:01 +0000

I recently downloaded Aptana Studio 1.1 Community Edition and have been using it mostly for my Javascript/ColdFusion development.

Intellisense for ExtJS by using com.extjs.ext.2.0_1.0.0.00000.jar from the ExtJS blog. Umm, I am hoping someday OpenLayers can provide a similar jar file to provide code assist.
I like the fact that it could clearly display an outline of my javascript objects but sometimes not for all.

But one of the major problems I encountered was the startup. Sometimes, for some unknown reason, Aptana cannot start using the executable it provided during the install. However, I was able to weed that problem out by instead launching it from startup.jar. All of these is documented from Aptana’s JIRA ticket.

1. Downloaded and install Aptana

2. Watched Aptana TV Overview

3. Installed cfeclipse http://www.cfeclipse.org/update

4. Installed viPlugin http://satokar.com/ (Note that the viPlugin would not work with files = *.html)

5. Added the extjs2.0 code assist

Eclipse High Memory

rupert — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 17:54:30 +0000

Awkward title, but I figure it would be easier for Google to crawl and index such keywords. Anyhow, I’ve been using Eclipse consistently for ColdFusion (CFEclipse) for the past 6 months now. The IDE’s features is really comprehensive and fit my needs, however, it is eating up 500 MB of memory. Though memory maybe cheap nowadays (I have 2 GB), it has been slowing down my productivity because of intermittent hangups and jvm pauses.

I realized that I am loading a lot of plugins for Eclipse, myEclipse, SVN (I preferred to use tortoiseSVN natively…), UML Diagram plugins, Visual Editor (for creating Swing components). So I disabled and uninstalled some of them from

1. HELP -> Software Updates -> Manage Configurations.
2. Right click on the plugin of choice.
3. Disable or uninstall.
4. You will be prompted to restart Eclipse. If an error fails, then a dependency is met, so be sure to disable/uninstall the dependency first.

Woot! From a whopping 500 MB, my Eclipse is now running at 87 MB. Afterwards, I jogged for two hours on the basement and went back to check, still 87 MB. Well obviously, it should be consistent since I didn’t do any interactions with it. Nevertheless, I am a happy Eclipse user once again!

PyDev Plugin For Eclipse

rupert — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 00:30:40 +0000

I had “indentation” problems a few times when I was doing Python using vim. Also, my chinese characters were not displaying correctly on VIM as well. But when I open the file in IDLE, I can read the chinese characters fine. Well I found a quick workaround for my indent problem by using the default Python Editor which is IDLE:

1. Edit -> Select ALL
2. Format -> Untabify Region
3. Specify “4″ spaces for the tabs.
4. To run your program, just press F5.

Well, just recently I managed some time and went to the ShowMeDo site for Python. There I found out about PyDev, please watch the screencast, its worth it! Firing Eclipse, I immediately added the plugin from the update site: http://pydev.sourceforge.net/updates/.

Once you have PyDev set, you need to tell Eclipse where your PYTHON bin, PYTHONPATH and other settings.
1. Go to Window -> Preferences
2. Collapse PyDev from left panel
3. Select “Interpreter-Python”
4. Click on “New” on the “Python Interpreters” Group.
5. Specify where python.exe.

Note: It would automatically add the libraries in your PYTHONPATH. Again, I insist you watch the screencast from Fabio to guide you through. To run your program just hit “F9″.