~pperalta

The latest release of Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse (OEPE) now includes a Coherence Facet. This makes it convenient to quickly start up a Coherence project and launch nodes right in the IDE. Recently I took it for a test drive and took some notes to help users of Eclipse and Coherence get started.

Note that all images below are thumbnails; click on the images to expand.

You have the option of downloading Eclipse with the OEPE plugins pre-installed, but I already had a copy of Eclipse Helios 3.6; therefore I went for the plugin install. The plugin install is straight forward, similar to any other Eclipse plugin. These instructions are lifted straight from the doc:

1. Select Help > Install New Software.
2. Click Add to add a new update site.
3. In the Add Repository dialog, enter the location as http://download.oracle.com/otn_software/oepe/helios, and then click OK.
4. Select Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse, verify that all of the subcomponents are selected, and then click Next.
5. Confirm information presented in the Install Details, and then click Finish.

Once the install is complete and you’ve restarted Eclipse, the next step is to install Coherence as a User Library. I’ve got the latest 3.6 bits from our source code repository, so I’ll install that as a library. Note that the plugin also supports Coherence 3.5.2.

Now, let’s create a new Java project. As part of the project creation, add Coherence as a project library.

After the project is created, we’ll have to enable Facets to use the Coherence plugin. Bring up the project properties window and search for “Facets” in the search field.

Once Facets are enabled, select Oracle Coherence.

Upon selection, a link indicating that further configuration is required will appear. Click on the link. Select the “Oracle Coherence 3.6″ library. Note how it provides the option to generate configuration files. Let’s leave all of the checkboxes selected.

Now we are ready to start a cache server. Select File | Run Configurations to bring up the Run Configurations dialog. First select “Oracle Coherence” under the list of run configurations. Next, select the “New” button on the upper left portion of the dialog to create a new run configuration.

Under the “Main” tab, enter com.tangosol.net.DefaultCacheServer as the main class. Of course you are free to create configurations with your own classes; however this example will focus on starting up a cache server.

Note the presence of a “Coherence” tab. This tab allows for operational configuration (items typically found in tangosol-coherence-override.xml) such as the cache configuration file name, multicast address configuration, management/JMX, and so on. Here I decided to leave all of the defaults as is.

After clicking on “Run”, here’s what I get:

We can see that the node started up and formed a cluster, but there are no services listed. This is because the OEPE plugin generated a cache configuration file that defaults to all caches being local. Next, let’s examine the cache configuration file (located under src and add a distributed/partitioned cache to the configuration.

One of the nice features the plugin provides is pre-configured auto complete for Coherence configuration files via the DTD.

Here’s the cache configuration file I used:

<!--?xml version="1.0"?-->
 
      *
      partitioned
 
      partitioned
 
      true

With the modified cache configuration, we now see the partitioned cache service start up:

I can see the Coherence plugin for OEPE being quite useful for Coherence developers on Eclipse not only for quickly starting up a Coherence project (since config files are generated) but also for enabling configuration validation out of the box.