Life by Bits & Numbers

If you’ve been experiencing horrendous performance of Eclipse on OS X, or maybe you even did not know that Eclipse actually can run very fast, you’d be surprised to learn that apparently it is very easy to make Eclipse run 4-5 times faster  on OS X with proper settings to your eclipse.ini file.

First I will give you a bit of  background. If you want the gist of it or how to make it fly – just go the end of the post.  So a few days ago, PSU fried on my main desktop development machine. It is a newer Quad Core i5 2.6 machine with 4GB 1066Mhz memory and a standard 7200 RPM drive. Since the machine is dead and I am waiting for a replacement power supply, I had to move to my new and shiny MacBook Pro, which I have recently purchased and which is from the latest batch of the updated MacBooks and is quite powerful. It is also i5 (only dual core though) with the same 4GB of 1066Mhz memory and 5400 HD.

So, yeah, I would say that the systems are pretty close right. Nevertheless, working with Eclipse on OS X felt horrendously slow! I had already noticed this nuance in the past and I thought that the Eclipse is just not meant to fly on Mac-s (oh well…), especially when there are so many different distributions for OS X, it signals that the project is in a shifting phase basically (it is shifting from Carbon to Cocoa) and that you should expect all kinds of problems. I bet many people

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The next version of the BlackBerry Eclipse plugin will fix most of the annoying things about blackberry development.

Some of the most important things are:

1) No need to restart emulator for new build to be loaded to the emulator (Hallelujah!!!)

The new build should be just loaded onto the already started simulator, pretty much as on Android and iPhone.

2) Ability to add external libraries i.e. *.jar files to the project

This is actually pretty peculiar since RIM was pushing hard 3-d party (external library) integration as one of important concepts and obviously it would be very beneficial for the BlackBerry ecosystem but if you did not want to use JDE, there was pretty much no clean way to add external library. That is until the 1.1 plugin comes out from beta, or at least that what was promised at the New England BlackBerry developers meetup.

3) The BlackBerry plugin would follow the “Eclipse way”

The 1.1 plugin is very different from previous version. Instead of following the “JDE way” it will be much more the natural “Eclipse way”. This is both good and bad. This is very good for developers that have experience with Eclipse and just now start to develop for BlackBerry. This will however be somewhat painful for the seasoned developers who got used to the old plugin and will need to discover many things from scratch. (I personally felt quite lost with the new 1.1 plugin and decided to stick with the old one until 1.1 comes out of beta).

You can download the beta of 1.1 from here (you would need to have BlackBerry developer account which is free and can be obtained with simple sign up immediately)

It’s not a secret that Eclipse plugin is very buggy and although it has improved a lot over the time, the blackberry plugin still has a lot of issues and quirks. One of the problems that have been bugging me a lot was that sometimes the *.jdp file gets corrupted. This is the file where BB plugin for Eclipse saves most of the meta data for the project, including the files that are included in the project and consequently need to be compiled. So, many times I had problems with SVN meta data files corrupting this project, or sometimes perfectly legitimate *.java files that get stuck in the *.jdp file, but do not exist anymore. The result of the *.jdp file being corrupted is that your application does no longer get compiled and redeployed when you run it. And the worst part, Eclipse would not explicitly let you know about this. It would silently fail and not re-deploy the app. So unless this is the first time you run the application, or the changes you made are not visually obvious, you would not know about this. But this is completely separate issue. One of the many issues with BB Eclipse plugin already covered. Each time I have been struggling (sometimes for significant amount of times). Couple times I was able to manually delete files from the *.jdp file (although this is not recommended by RIM) and this solved the problem, but mostly I had to recreate the whole project from scratch, which if your project is large and, which is more important has dependencies on libraries, may become painful if you need to do this every few days.

So the easiest way I found so far to solve this problem is:

1. Delete the *.jdp file (you can just rename it to *.jdp.OLD)
2. Delete the project from Eclipse (right click the project and choose delete). DO NOT however check the checkbox “delete the contents of the project from disk”
3. Create a new project and point it to the same place.

Since all the Eclipse project related files remain untouched, you should get your project exactly at the same state it was before it got corrupted, minus the corrupted part. Why – because when you re-create the project Eclipse plugin should re-create the *.jdp file.