Eclipse Setup

VMware vSphere HTML Client SDK

Eclipse Setup

Eclipse Configuration
SDK Tools Eclipse Plug-in
Virgo Server Setup
Mac OS Notes
Development Tips

This page contains setup instructions specific to the Eclipse IDE and Spring Tool Suite (STS).

1. Eclipse Configuration

Download the Eclipse version of your choice from eclipse.org (or the STS version of your choice from Spring Tool Suite) and install it anywhere on your disk. Eclipse comes in different packages, pick Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers, not the smaller package Eclipse IDE for Java Developers.

Eclipse.ini

Before using Eclipse you should edit its Eclipse.ini file to set the Java JDK version and increase memory if necessary. On Mac OS the .ini file is hidden, right-click on the application icon and select Show Package Contents, the file is in Contents/MacOS.

Add these 2 lines to tell Eclipse to use your installed JDK. Remove any space before each line!

-vm
C:/<your JAVA_HOME directory>/bin/java.exe

Add or change these VM arguments to increase memory:

-Xmx1024m
-XX:MaxPermSize=512m

See more info in the Eclipse.ini wiki.

Eclipse preferences

Start Eclipse and go to Window > Preferences

In General you can check "Show heap status" to display a memory indicator.
In General/Network Connections you can setup proxy settings for your location.
In General/Workspace we recommend to keep "Build automatically" on, and also turn on "Refresh using native hooks" in case you edit sources outside Eclipse from time to time.
In Java/Code Style/Formatter you should define your code formatting conventions.
In Java/Installed JREs add the JDK you had installed earlier and make sure it is the default.

In order to build SDK examples you need to set two VSPHERE_CLIENT_SDK variables.

Go to Window > Preferences > General > Workspace > Linked Resources as shown below, and add a new path variable VSPHERE_CLIENT_SDK pointing to the location of your html-client-sdk directory.

Go to Window > Preferences > Java > Build path > Classpath variables as shown below, and add a path variable VSPHERE_CLIENT_SDK pointing to the location of your html-client-sdk directory.

2. SDK Tools Eclipse Plug-in

The vSphere HTML Client SDK includes an Eclipse plug-in with various tools to help your HTML plug-in development, including a wizard to create UI and service plug-in projects easily.

Before trying to install new software make sure that Eclipse's Network Connections settings are correct, otherwise the UI won't be responsive.
If your work location requires a proxy go to Window > Preferences > General > Network Connections to set it up.

Go to Help > Install New Software...
Click Add... to select a new site location
- Click Local... and browse to your html-client-sdk/tools/Eclipse plugin site directory
- You can name this local site "vSphere Client SDK plugin site" (you will be able to re-use it later if you install the versions of the Eclipse plugin at the same place)

Continue the wizard.
Click Finish, this starts the Eclipse plugin installation.
A popup comes up to warn you that this plugin doesn't have a certificate.
Finally you are asked to restart Eclipse or STS before you can use the new plugin.

After you restart Eclipse you can verify that the plugin is correctly installed:

Open Help > About Eclipse
Click on Installation Details
See "vSphere Web Client SDK Tools" in the list of Installed Software
Note that you can also uninstall the plugin from this view
Finally, if you select File > New > Other... you should see a vSphere Web Client folder containing the wizard to create new projects:

For more information on how to use this wizard please see the tutorial doc.

3. Virgo Server setup

This section explains how to install the Eclipse Virgo Tools and use the Virgo server within the Eclipse IDE. This is not a requirement but it will improve your development experience.

If you are using an old Eclipse version (before Luna 4.4) please see this Eclipse Virgo Tooling wiki.

Open Help > Install New Software... and click Add...
Add the repository http://download.eclipse.org/virgo/snapshot/tooling as shown below.
(if the URL is not responding check your Eclipse proxy settings Window > Preferences > General > Network Connections)
Select Eclipse Virgo Tools and nothing else
Follow the installation wizard (you will need to restart Eclipse at the end).

Once you have restarted Eclipse:

Select the Servers view under Window > Show Views
Look for the Servers tab in the bottom panel and right click to create a new server.

In the new server wizard, select the type Eclipse RT > Virgo Runtime and click Next.

In the next screen, for the installation directory, select the server directory inside your SDK folder.
(The message "Valid installation" will popup at the top once you select the right directory). You can leave the default server name as is.

Click Finish.

Virgo Run Configuration

On Mac OS you need to define the environment variable VMWARE_CFG_DIR in a Virgo Run Configuration as shown below otherwise the server won't start'. See the next section for more Mac tips.

On Windows, it shouldn't be necessary as long as you defined the environment variable VMWARE_CFG_DIR before starting Eclipse (value is C:/ProgramData/VMware/vCenterServer/cfg/).

Additional Virgo Configuration

Double click on the server instance in the Server view, this opens an Overview page.

Check options Start server with -clean option and Tail deploy events into Console view .. at the bottom right.
Remove *.xml from the list under Redeploy Behavior (so that changes in plugin.xml files trigger hot deployment of the bundle).

4. Mac OS Notes

The Finder hides many files by default, it is easiest to make them all visible using this command in your terminal window: defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES

The Eclipse.ini or STS.ini file used to configure startup options is hidden, right-click on the application icon and select Show Package Contents, the file is in Contents/MacOS.

When starting Virgo under your user account (on the command line or from Eclipse) your plugin code may not have read/write permissions in local directories being used. The solution is to set the proper permission for your account. For instance, when saving setting values in the globalview sample, you will get an error if you haven't set write permission to /var/lib/storage because the data is saved in /var/lib/storage/globalview.

Environment variables

Environment variables are a little tricky on the Mac.
When using scripts on the command line (Terminal window) the easiest is to set them in your ~/.bash_profile. But you need to start Eclipse from the same terminal window with Open [PATH-TO-ECLIPSE-APP]
See this article for other solutions.

However this won't work if you run the Ant build scripts from Eclipse unless you start Eclipse from the command line which is not always practical. The recommended solution is to edit the Ant Runtime Preferences, adding the property for VSPHERE_SDK_HOME as shown below:

Make sure NOT to use quotes around your paths, even if they contain spaces!

5. Development tips

Ant builder

An easy way to compile resource files is to setup an Ant Builder in your Eclipse project configuration as shown below. It executes the build-resources.xml script each time you build the project:

More on Virgo Tools

You can take advantage of the Virgo server editor to learn more about the currently installed bundles and their dependencies. This is a good place to start to verify that all your components are deployed and have the correct dependencies.

Open the server editor, double-click on the Virgo instance in the Eclipse Server view, select the Bundle Overview tab and click the yellow button at the top to refresh the list of bundles. Select any bundle to see its details, including the manifest's content and the packages imported and exported.

Click the link Show dependency graph for bundle to open the Dependency tab for the selected bundle. For instance the graph for MyService shows a simple package dependency with the UI bundle MyPlugin: this was configured in MyPlugin's manifest earlier so that the client code can reference the interface com.mycompany.myService.MyService.

Clicking on the node MyPlugin reveals all the other dependencies from that bundle (they are the ones generated by the wizard in the manifest so that MyPlugin can communicate with Java services).

For more information see the Virgo Guides available through Help > Help Contents.

See also: Javascript API - Java API - FAQ