The Eclipse Web Tools Platform Project is an open source project of eclipse.org, overseen by a Project Management Committee (PMC) and project leaders. The PMC Planning Council coordinates identified resources of the project against a Project Development Plan. The work is done in sub projects working against a CVS repository.

The Eclipse Web Tools Platform Project Charter describes the organization of the project, roles and responsibilities of the participants, and top-level development process for the project. See http://www.eclipse.org/webtools/index.html

Web Standard Tools

The Web Standard Tools subproject aims to provide common infrastructure available to any Eclipse-based development environment targeting Web-enabled applications. Within scope will be tools for the development of three-tier (presentation, business and data logic) and server publication of corresponding system artifacts. Outside scope will be language or web framework specific technology, which will be left to other sub projects like the J2EE Web Tools subproject.
Tools provided will include editors, validators and document generators for artifacts developed in a wide range of standard languages (for example, HTML/xHMTL, Web services, XQueries, SQL, etc.) Supporting infrastructure will likely comprise a specialized workbench supporting actions such as publish, run, start and stop of Web application code across target server environments.

J2EE Standard Tools

The initial scope of the J2EE Standard Tools subproject will be to provide a basic Eclipse plug-in for developing applications based on J2EE 1.4 targeting J2EE-compliant application servers, as well as a generic J2EE tooling infrastructure for other Eclipse-based development products.
Within scope will be a workbench providing a framework for developing, deploying, testing and debugging J2EE applications on JCP-compliant server environments, as well as an exemplary implementation of a plug-in for at least one JSR-88 compliant J2EE Server. Included will be a range of tools simplifying development with J2EE APIs including EJB, Servlet, JSP, JCA, JDBC, JTA, JMS, JMX, JNDI, and Web Services. This infrastructure will be architected for extensibility for higher-level development constructs providing architectural separations of concern and technical abstraction above the level of the J2EE specifications

The integrated workbench to be delivered would support use cases such as " - Develop a JSP page, Enhance the "PetStore" blue-print application, Expose a Session Bean as a Web Service".

Initial code submissions by IBM and Lomboz are available for download and feedback. For those that are anxious here's a more direct link to:

The Getting Started Guide for the initial IBM contribution:

http://www.eclipse.org/webtools/initial-contribution/IBM/Getting%20Started.html

and the Lomboz Getting Started Guide at:

http://www.eclipse.org/webtools/initial-contribution/OBJECTWEB/Getting%20Started.html

"Eclipse is waxing. soon it will overshadow the Sun.".

Ice, the prophet

It is?

Eclipse is awesome, but I haven't really been a fan of the Lomboz project. Why was that chosen to be used for the basis of the Web Tools?

Didn't it start out as a commercial plug-in (Free to Non-Commercial use), then due to the lack of whatever, they open sourced it?

IMHO MyEclipse is far better polished for web development. Costs $30 a year, and just with their easy to use JSP Debugging tool, more than justifies that cost.

Does MyEclipse support niceties like "Find References" and refactoring at the JSP level?

If it doesn't then I would rather use Lomboz which is good enough for JSPs as it supports syntax highlighting and code completion.

There are two competing options for the core of the WTP. The most important one in my view is the IBM contribution which contains a good chunk of the WebSphere J2EE tools: EMF models for deployment descriptors, XML/XML Schema editors, JSP editors (with a real parser, not Tomcat), etc.

Hopefully, most of the development will come out of the IBM tools, seeing as they are already commerically tested. They could get some stuff from Lomboz, I suppose, but the feature overlap between the two will make that difficult. Even though ObjectWeb is leading the project, I'm assuming they won't play politics over which feature is better between the two implementations.

It's going to be tough for commerical IDE vendors to compete with this offering. Workflow, UML/MDA and database modeling are pretty much the only market segments that won't compete directly with the Eclipse platform.

It is? Eclipse is awesome, but I haven't really been a fan of the Lomboz project. Why was that chosen to be used for the basis of the Web Tools?

Answer is simple. It wasn't. The agreement has been to base the the initial offering on IBM's contribution (have you had a chance to look at the Getting Started Guide referenced above? It will give you a fairly good idea of what IBM's contribution is. To agreee with the first poster, it IS amazing! (but, I am biased since I am a core IBM developer and contributed to this contribution... :-).

Check it out...Download the plugins and give it a whirl. Then tell me its not amazing :-)

Then tell me its not amazing :-)

It's amazing! It seems better than WSAD 5.1.1

Answer is simple. It wasn't. The agreement has been to base the the initial offering on IBM's contribution (have you had a chance to look at the Getting Started Guide referenced above? It will give you a fairly good idea of what IBM's contribution is. To agreee with the first poster, it IS amazing! (but, I am biased since I am a core IBM developer and contributed to this contribution... :-). Check it out...Download the plugins and give it a whirl. Then tell me its not amazing :-)

Yes it is! Now we can drop Websphere Studio at work!! ;-)

I'm completly impressed! I supposed something in testing stage, but got a complete and (now!) stable product. I like new features, IMO IBM contribution is much more convinient, mature and feature rich than Lomboz 3. Awesome! Kudos to IBM.

I have been waiting for this for ages. I cannot find any tooling for home use (free) for EJB development. Maybe it will be here at last ;)

I have been waiting for this for ages. I cannot find any tooling for home use (free) for EJB development. Maybe it will be here at last ;)

xDoclet?

It even has code completion for javascript and css, something I allways missed dearly in IDEA, it's simply awsome

Yes it looks really nice but I wish that Weblogic support
will soon be added to the list of servers. It would really rock.
(Lomboz already supports Weblogic server)

>This infrastructure will be architected for extensibility for higher-level >development constructs
A Beehive plug-in could also be built on top of it...

WOW!! This is really nice.
But in the same time it's a death of all small plugins because one can get a huuge piece, of WebShere for free.

IBM donated some WSAD plugins to
Eclipse foundation .
what will we see in next WSAD releas in 2004 4th Q
will ibm anounce new approach for making j2ee developing easyer ?
if not , it will lose its market , doeast it?

Of those who have looked at this, does anybody know how to get the Database Explorer to work with MySQL (on Fedora Core 1 with Eclipse 3.0)?

Cool. This is what I've been looking for.

Just a thing I can not figure out, so I would appreciate opinions:

Why IBM is offering self-competence against WSAD?

IMHO, Eclipse rocks, and probably, me and a lot of people around, would not need to use WSAD. Where is the trick?

Just a thing I can not figure out, so I would appreciate opinions:Why IBM is offering self-competence against WSAD?IMHO, Eclipse rocks, and probably, me and a lot of people around, would not need to use WSAD. Where is the trick?

Maybe WSAD dies already. Why wait. They got enough from it. They'll move to something else. Like plugins/new features for webtools + TONS of services around them.

This is excellent news!

sun announced that netbeans 4.0 will contain full j2ee support (beans). i haven't taken a look at what this will include, but this move by IBM to suddenly jumpstart a project that's been around dormant for quite some time seems rather ractionary to the sun announcement. competition seems to be good for the "comsumer".

having said that, i have some eclipse plugins to go check out.

Note that while one of the two 'initial contributions' (or whatever) is from IBM, the Web Tools project is an Eclipse project, not an IBM one. The other contribution that was made is not an IBM one.

Also note that while there hasn't been a whole lot of activity at the Eclipse Web Tools project since it was originally announced, this was largely due to getting the project set up. With the addition of a couple of shepards (John Wiegand and Bjorn Freeman-Benson), the project started making some real progress a couple of months ago. What you're seeing with the initial contributions is the expected output of the current process. Could well be that the Sun Netbeans 4.0 announcement (which I've not seen) is a reaction to the progress that the Eclipse WTP is making. <grin/>

I'm personally not impressed with the WSAD tools, namely the JSP editor. I use it almost daily and it is the worst editor in the tool. It is the only one that I cannot change the background colors, change the tab settings, etc. What is really odd is that you can change some of these settings on the XML, CSS, and HTML files however. The inconsistency is annoying and it is generally just slow.

I've been using MyExclipse (never could get Lomboz to work on E3) on E3 for my personal stuff and just love it.

See: http://www.objectweb.org/phorum/read.php?f=25&i=69&t=69

Enjoy!

I can not use these contributes. They does NOT work! Stupid!

I must use a clean version of Eclipse 3.0 to use these contributes. I used a version of Eclipse 3.0 and I changed something in preference, this makes these contributes does not work!

IBM's reason for contributing is simple, provide a starting point and they will see the benefits from the open source effort. I have used WSAD previously, and I am currently using Eclipse3.0 and MyEclipse. WSAD has serious memory problems which I have not had with MyEclipse.
Yesterday I downloaded the IBM contribs and installed them. Within an hour I had gotten 2 out of memory errors(which forced a restart). I have been using MyEclipse for about 7 months now and I have not once had an out of memory error.
Besides the memory error, IBM have finally realised that they are now competing with Lomboz(open source) and MyEclipse($29 annual subs) and who knows how many others are there down the line.

How confusing is this? I installed both, assuming this is what I was supposed to do since it doesn't mention this small bit, and followed all directions. Now I have the ability to create a J2EE Project or a Lomboz J2EE project. Each very different. From what I can tell, there is absolutely nothing different in the Lomboz contrib. than the orig. Lomboz project itself. A cleaner solution would have been to take the best of each and create a new project.

Additionally, Lomboz states that I can debug a JSP. Not 100% accurate. I can debug the servlet code after being compiled by the container. No exactly what I had in mind. Not a bad feature, but a little frustrating when you expect something else. I was used to debugging the actual JSP file when I use to use Together for Java coding. Eclipse is better, IMHO.

The URL http://www.eclipse.org/webtools/initial-contribution/ibm.zip is a 404 ?

Is there any mirror ?

Thx,
-emmanuel

Hi All - Unable to see this wonderful new development because of emmanuel's initially reported 404 on ibm.zip - any news on this?

Pls check out the following link

http://www.eclipse.org/webtools/initial-contribution/IBM/Getting%20Started.html

The link goes to a 404 "Not found" page. Is there another link for the same file?

The link is fixed (thanks go to Arthur Ryman at IBM for fixing it within ours of my email to the webmaster for eclipse)

Hi Charlie Nuzzolo do you know where can i get hold of the ibm.zip eclipse plugin?

Thanks

People often doesn't realize that Eclipse is not really for Web development but for "pure" Java application. All those buggy plug-ins like Lomboz, MyEclipse and the new J2EE Eclipse sponsored project are all fun to experiment with but eat precious time. If you don't work in a poor country it's very difficult to justify that you lost your time and productivity with those sub quality plug-ins.

IDEA it's reasonabily prized and it probably cost less than you cost for 8 hours of work!