I’ve long resisted MyEclipse; I always thought that I could assemble the Eclipse plug-ins myself. But after feeling a bit jealous watching some of my co-workers demonstrate the power of MyEclipse 4.0, I decided to take the plunge and hop on board the MyEclipse train, using it for development of Spring-Struts-Hibernate web application. It’s gone pretty well, but I have run into a few issues.

Armed with Voodoo Pad (an awesome wiki-like tool for the Mac), I recorded the issues I encountered along with their solutions. Here’s a short list from my first day’s experience.

• Don’t use the MySQL 3.0.8 Connector/J driver. Instead use version 3.1.10. You will not be able to establish a connection in the DatabaseExplorer using the old driver.
• If MyEclipse shows an error in your applicationContext.xml file, go into Project > Properties > MyEclipse-Spring. Remove the existing spring beans files; then add them back and it should resolve the issue.
• Adding “Spring Capabilities” (as defined out-of-the-box) doesn’t add the spring-hibernate.jar. You will need to add this file manually to your WEB-INF/lib.
• If you do not specify the “class” for an element in your struts-config.xml (e.g. when you are using Spring’s DelegatingRequestProcessor), the MyEclipse Struts designer will not automatically draw a line, representing a local forward, from the action to the JSP.
• If using multiple related Spring configuration files (e.g. applicationContext.xml and action-servlet.xml) you must define those as a “Config Set” in your MyEclipse-Spring project properties; otherwise, MyEclipse will complain that it can find references between the files.

Overall, I am very pleased with MyEclipse; I have found it to be comparable to the Eclipse Web Tools Platform; plus it has built in support for Hibernate, Spring, and Struts. When you do run into problems, the MyEclipse forums are a great way to track down those pesky problems.

Feel free to add your own MyEclipse tips …