SWT Javadoc / RCP Developer

[arick]

I am trying to locate a safe, local version of SWT Javadoc's. My installation of the latest RCP Developer and SWT Designer on top of MyEclipse 6.0 includes the help text for "Plug-In Development Environment". But it doesn't include "Platform Plug-in Developer Guide", which has the SWT Javadocs. Where can I get a download of the SWT Javadocs that is sanctioned by Instantations to not to mess up RCP Developer or SWT Designer?

If this sounds paranoic, I am gun-shy because the last time I pulled down an update directly, it totally hosed up my entire eclipse install. I had to delete, re-update everything and reload all my projects

BTW: Just as a forewarning, the site that messed me up was "http://eclipsercp.com/update", the web-site associated with Eclipse Rich Client Platform. Considering that the associated book is a companion volume to the book from Eric Clayberg and company, and it comes highly recommended, I was amazed that their software update site would so totally hose up a current version of Eclipse.

[Eric Clayberg]

I am trying to locate a safe, local version of SWT Javadoc's. My installation of the latest RCP Developer and SWT Designer on top of MyEclipse 6.0 includes the help text for "Plug-In Development Environment". But it doesn't include "Platform Plug-in Developer Guide", which has the SWT Javadocs. Where can I get a download of the SWT Javadocs that is sanctioned by Instantiations to not to mess up RCP Developer or SWT Designer?

I can't imagine that any version of the SWT Javadocs would cause a problem. You should be able to get them from the update sites available at Eclipse.org. Since you are using MyEclipse, you might want to ask MyEclipse support if they have a preferred update site. Our products won't care either way.

If this sounds paranoid, I am gun-shy because the last time I pulled down an update directly, it totally hosed up my entire eclipse install. I had to delete, re-update everything and reload all my projects

If you are pulling down base Eclipse pieces, I would recommend using the update sites supplied by Eclipse.org or by your IDE vendor (MyEclipse in this case).

BTW: Just as a forewarning, the site that messed me up was "http://eclipsercp.com/update", the web-site associated with Eclipse Rich Client Platform. Considering that the associated book is a companion volume to the book from Eric Clayberg and company, and it comes highly recommended, I was amazed that their software update site would so totally hose up a current version of Eclipse.

The only thing the two books have in common is the publisher. While they do compliment each other, they were written by two unrelated groups. The RCP book was targeted at Eclipse 3.1, so I can imagine that any update sites it provides are Eclipse 3.1 specific. Applying Eclipse 3.1 updates to an Eclipse 3.3 or 3.4 environment could possibly cause trouble. It is always a good idea to check that the update site you are accessing is meant for the Eclipse version you are using.

[arick]

My problem is that because of the way that RCP Developer / SWT Designer installs, the only way I could get SWT Designer to recognize my MyEclipse installation was to install the complete MyEclipse bundle, with the Eclipse platform bundle included.

Once this process was completed, Eclipse thinks that I have a complete Plug-In Developer and RCP Developer platform. The problem is, I don't. Neither RCP Developer, nor MyEclipse is installing the "Platform Plug-in Developer Guide". According to my understanding, this is what actually contains the SWT documentation. The documentation appears to be inside of "plugins\org.eclipse.platform.doc.isv_3.3.1.r331_v20070913.jar", or whatever version of the jar is pertinent.

I have searched the SWT site, and the best I can find is directions for viewing the docs online (which given my ISP is DirectWay, is not a viable option), or download a PDF version. Neither of which gracefully support interrogating the SWT Javadocs while using SWT Designer.

This may be a customer expectation thing, but it seems like a realistic expectation to me, as a SWT Designer user, that an installation of SWT Designer would either include the documentation/Javadocs for SWT, or that the SWT Designer FAQ would point out where and how I could download them.

[Eric Clayberg]

My problem is that because of the way that RCP Developer / SWT Designer installs

I'm not sure what you mean by "the way that RCP Developer / SWT Designer installs". Both products can be installed using an installer or a simple ZIP file. SWT Designer also offers a update site installation option.

the only way I could get SWT Designer to recognize my MyEclipse installation was to install the complete MyEclipse bundle, with the Eclipse platform bundle included.

I'm not sure what problem you ran into, but we have never had a problem installing either product into any version of MyEclipse. In fact, our records indicate that we have more than 3,000 current users of both products that have installed and activated them in MyEclipse.

Once this process was completed, Eclipse thinks that I have a complete Plug-In Developer and RCP Developer platform. The problem is, I don't. Neither RCP Developer, nor MyEclipse is installing the "Platform Plug-in Developer Guide". According to my understanding, this is what actually contains the SWT documentation. The documentation appears to be inside of "plugins\org.eclipse.platform.doc.isv_3.3.1.r331_v20070913.jar", or whatever version of the jar is pertinent.

That plugin is included in the basic Eclipse distribution (not the PDE), so I have no idea why it wouldn't be present in your environment. In any case, that plugin should be provided by the IDE itself, so you should direct this issue to your IDE provider. Installing that plugin is absolutely not our responsibility as that plugin should always be present.

I have searched the SWT site, and the best I can find is directions for viewing the docs online (which given my ISP is DirectWay, is not a viable option), or download a PDF version. Neither of which gracefully support interrogating the SWT Javadocs while using SWT Designer.

Have you asked on the Eclipse SWT newsgroup?

This may be a customer expectation thing, but it seems like a realistic expectation to me, as a SWT Designer user, that an installation of SWT Designer would either include the documentation/Javadocs for SWT, or that the SWT Designer FAQ would point out where and how I could download them.

No. Absolutely not. SWT and the SWT docs are part of the core Eclipse installation, and we have no responsibility for that. As those docs are normally included as part of the IDE, we would have no reason to ever expect them to be missing or to include information on how to resolve a problem that we weren't even aware could exist.

If you know which plugin is missing, why not simply add that plugin to your Eclipse installation? It's available as part of the standard Eclipse download, so it is readily available from the Eclipse.org web site. Making it available to Eclipse should be as easy as dropping it into the /plugins directory and restarting with the -clean option.

[arick]

You are correct that the SWT Javadocs should be a part of the standard install. In fact, even with MyEclipse, it turns out that the SWT Javadocs are present. I wasn't able to locate them because was I was looking for a directory when what I should have been looking for was a jar file The file in MyEclipse 6.0 is named: MyEclipse 60/eclipse/plugins/org.eclipse.platform.doc.isv_3.3.1.r331_v20070913.jar.

However, the problem that a new SWT developer runs into, is that the swt.jar that they are using as a library doesn't have the SWT Javadocs embedded. Subsequently, Eclipse can't find the SWT Javadocs and it regularly complains about it.

The solution is to right-click on the swt.jar file that you are using for development, and set its "Properties->Javadoc Location".

From there, I used the option "Javadoc in Archive" to point to the above directory and file. Then, I needed to set the location in the archive file to be "reference/api".

Then it works like a charm.

BTW: Thanks for a great tool. I am just beginning to scratch the surface of its capabilities.

[Eric Clayberg]

If you use SWT Designer's SWT/JFace Java Project wizard, it will set up the classpath so that the sources and javadocs are attached to each referenced jar.

For example, the following would be generated for Eclipse 3.3.2...

Code: Select all

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<classpath>
   <classpathentry kind="src" path="src"/>
   <classpathentry kind="con" path="org.eclipse.jdt.launching.JRE_CONTAINER"/>
   <classpathentry kind="lib" path="D:/eclipse3.3.2/plugins/org.eclipse.osgi_3.3.2.R33x_v20080105.jar" sourcepath="D:/eclipse3.3.2/plugins/org.eclipse.rcp.source_3.3.3.r33x_r20080129-8y8eE9UEUWI6qujeED0xT7bc/src/org.eclipse.osgi_3.3.2.R33x_v20080105/src.zip"/>
   <classpathentry kind="lib" path="D:/eclipse3.3.2/plugins/org.eclipse.ui.forms_3.3.0.v20070511.jar" sourcepath="D:/eclipse3.3.2/plugins/org.eclipse.platform.source_3.3.3.r33x_r20080129-_19UEl7Ezk_gXF1kouft/src/org.eclipse.ui.forms_3.3.0.v20070511/src.zip"/>
   <classpathentry kind="lib" path="D:/eclipse3.3.2/plugins/org.eclipse.core.commands_3.3.0.I20070605-0010.jar" sourcepath="D:/eclipse3.3.2/plugins/org.eclipse.rcp.source_3.3.3.r33x_r20080129-8y8eE9UEUWI6qujeED0xT7bc/src/org.eclipse.core.commands_3.3.0.I20070605-0010/src.zip"/>
   <classpathentry kind="lib" path="D:/eclipse3.3.2/plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.common_3.3.0.v20070426.jar" sourcepath="D:/eclipse3.3.2/plugins/org.eclipse.rcp.source_3.3.3.r33x_r20080129-8y8eE9UEUWI6qujeED0xT7bc/src/org.eclipse.equinox.common_3.3.0.v20070426/src.zip"/>
   <classpathentry kind="lib" path="D:/eclipse3.3.2/plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.registry_3.3.1.R33x_v20070802.jar" sourcepath="D:/eclipse3.3.2/plugins/org.eclipse.rcp.source_3.3.3.r33x_r20080129-8y8eE9UEUWI6qujeED0xT7bc/src/org.eclipse.equinox.registry_3.3.1.R33x_v20070802/src.zip"/>
   <classpathentry kind="lib" path="D:/eclipse3.3.2/plugins/org.eclipse.core.runtime_3.3.100.v20070530.jar" sourcepath="D:/eclipse3.3.2/plugins/org.eclipse.rcp.source_3.3.3.r33x_r20080129-8y8eE9UEUWI6qujeED0xT7bc/src/org.eclipse.core.runtime_3.3.100.v20070530/src.zip"/>
   <classpathentry kind="lib" path="D:/eclipse3.3.2/plugins/org.eclipse.text_3.3.0.v20070606-0010.jar" sourcepath="D:/eclipse3.3.2/plugins/org.eclipse.platform.source_3.3.3.r33x_r20080129-_19UEl7Ezk_gXF1kouft/src/org.eclipse.text_3.3.0.v20070606-0010/src.zip"/>
   <classpathentry kind="lib" path="D:/eclipse3.3.2/plugins/org.eclipse.swt.win32.win32.x86_3.3.3.v3349.jar" sourcepath="D:/eclipse3.3.2/plugins/org.eclipse.rcp.source.win32.win32.x86_3.3.3.r33x_r20080129-8y8eE9UEUWI6qujeED0xT7bc/src/org.eclipse.swt.win32.win32.x86_3.3.3.v3349/src.zip"/>
   <classpathentry kind="lib" path="D:/eclipse3.3.2/plugins/org.eclipse.jface_3.3.2.M20080207-0800.jar" sourcepath="D:/eclipse3.3.2/plugins/org.eclipse.rcp.source_3.3.3.r33x_r20080129-8y8eE9UEUWI6qujeED0xT7bc/src/org.eclipse.jface_3.3.2.M20080207-0800/src.zip"/>
   <classpathentry kind="lib" path="D:/eclipse3.3.2/plugins/org.eclipse.jface.text_3.3.2.r332_20071017-0800.jar" sourcepath="D:/eclipse3.3.2/plugins/org.eclipse.platform.source_3.3.3.r33x_r20080129-_19UEl7Ezk_gXF1kouft/src/org.eclipse.jface.text_3.3.2.r332_20071017-0800/src.zip"/>
   <classpathentry kind="lib" path="D:/eclipse3.3.2/plugins/org.eclipse.ui.workbench_3.3.2.M20080207-0800.jar" sourcepath="D:/eclipse3.3.2/plugins/org.eclipse.rcp.source_3.3.3.r33x_r20080129-8y8eE9UEUWI6qujeED0xT7bc/src/org.eclipse.ui.workbench_3.3.2.M20080207-0800/src.zip"/>
   <classpathentry kind="output" path="bin"/>
</classpath>

[arick]

I'm not sure what problem you ran into, but we have never had a problem installing either product into any version of MyEclipse. In fact, our records indicate that we have more than 3,000 current users of both products that have installed and activated them in MyEclipse.

According to the response I got from Instantiations support

That's because the MyEclipse plug-in does not include Eclipse. You need to install MyEclipse and point to your Eclipse RCP installation then install RCP Developer and point to your Eclipse installation not MyEclipse.

If you use the MyEclipse all-in-one package then you can install RCP Developer into MyEclipse.

I had downloaded Eclipse RCP, then ran the MyEclipse plug-in installer executable and accepted all the default locations. TTBOMK, this is a perfectly valid configuration and it runs MyEclipse just fine. Unfortunately, in this configuration, the installation executable for RCP Developer didn't believe that the MyEclipse directory was a valid Eclipse directory. It wasn't selected by default and the RCP Developer installer wouldn't recognize it when I tried to point at it during installation. Consequently, regardless of whether I activated Eclipse from the C:\Eclipse directory, or from the "C:\Program Files\MyEclipse 6.0" directory, the option to select or activate RCP Developer was never present.

At that point, I received the feedback from support that there were implementation reasons that the installer wouldn't recognize that configuration, so I backed it out and re-installed the MyEclipse/Eclipse bundle.

[Eric Clayberg]

I had downloaded Eclipse RCP, then ran the MyEclipse plug-in installer executable and accepted all the default locations. TTBOMK, this is a perfectly valid configuration and it runs MyEclipse just fine. Unfortunately, in this configuration, the installation executable for RCP Developer didn't believe that the MyEclipse directory was a valid Eclipse directory. It wasn't selected by default and the RCP Developer installer wouldn't recognize it when I tried to point at it during installation. Consequently, regardless of whether I activated Eclipse from the C:\Eclipse directory, or from the "C:\Program Files\MyEclipse 6.0" directory, the option to select or activate RCP Developer was never present.

The directory in which you installed the MyEclispe plugins is separate and distinct from your Eclipse installation (unless you are using the all-in-one edition). Our installer targets the base Eclipse installation in the same way that the MyEclipse plugins do. The MyEclipse plugin directory is not a valid Eclipse installation itself, so it would not make sense for our installer to do anything with it.