Life by Bits & Numbers » Eclipse

Installing/Updating BlackBerry Eclipse SDK – problem with authentication

Inteist — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 02:16:25 +0000

If you are getting an error similar to the error below while trying to install and/or update BlackBerry SDK as a plugin for Eclipse

An error occurred while collecting items to be installed session context was:
(profile=AppceleratorProfile, phase=org.eclipse.equinox.internal.p2.engine.phases.Collect, operand=, action=).
Unable to read repository at:
Unable to read repository at https://swdownloads.blackberry.com/Downloads/auth/contactFormPreload.do?code=
...

You are in luck!

Your problems are over as you found the solution. All you need to do is to clear the “Secure Storage” contents. To do that go to

Windows -> Preferences

Type secure, drill down to find the org.eclipse.equinox.p2.repository, expand this, and you will see the swdownloads.blackberry.com. Select this entry and delete it. This should resolve the issue next time you try to update/install the plugin you should be asked again for your credentials to the BlackBerry developer portal and once you put them in the installation should proceed normally.

Here’s how it looks in Eclipse:

Eclipse marking SVN changes like Netbeans

Inteist — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 01:34:53 +0000

Eclipse is a great tool that I have been using for mmm… wow (!!!) probably about 7 years now and the most amazing thing about it is of course all the plugins that can really extend the functionality of the basic editor and make it highly personalized. This is great, but some things should just be in a good IDE. Like built in SVN integration. Seriously, why do I need to install a plugin for something so basic? Netbeans is another great IDE, but I use it less as most my development environments come from dedicated Eclipse plugins and while it is possible to do the development in Netbeans it is not as convenient and straightforward and this is what we the pragmatic programmers usually prefer.

So one nice thing I got used to in Netbeans is how it colors the changes that I made in the editor if the file is under version control (e.g. SVN). After I used Netbeans for a while and got to like this feature, when I got back to Eclipse I kinda missed it. It’s nice and convenient. Quite non obtrusive i.e. it doesn’t get in your way – you may not even be noticing this if you don’t know about it.

Anyways, turns out that it is quite easy to enable similar functionality for Eclipse, alas you have to have SVN plugin I suppose for the “diff” to work. Just follow the screenshot if you want to enable coloring of SVN changes in Eclipse similar to Netbeans.

Here’s how it will look (you can change colors if you want)

How to fix Android debug certificate expire error

Inteist — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 03:13:49 +0000

Problem:

You are getting the following error:

android Error generating final archive: Debug certificate expired on …

One day when you opened your Eclipse with Android tool chain installed, suddenly you see this error, which may seem weird because you know that Eclipse uses just some random certificate for debugging and so why is it expired and what to do.

The Solution:

Simply delete the keystore file which is located in

%USERHOME%/.android/debug.keystore (on Windows)

~/.android/debug.keystore (on Linux and OS X)

Restart your eclipse and you are all set.

Why this happens:

The reason to this is that the debug certificate is set to expire every year or 365 days.

If you do not wish to be bothered by this again in a year, you can use the keytool executable from the Android tool chain to generate a certificate with a longer expiration period.

How to speed up Eclipse on OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

Inteist — Fri, 28 May 2010 07:12:22 +0000

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 not having experience with Eclipse on other platforms would think this is normal. It’s Java, so it is supposed to be slow and they just go and hate it and sing how X-Code is great. The thing is, they probably never experienced the full potential of Eclipse – a pity. Hopefully this post can change your mind and help you experience the wonderful world of Eclipse (ok, I am being a little dramatic here). Ok, let’s dive into that.

Since I am pretty heavy user of Eclipse developing both for Android and BlackBerry the slowness of Eclipse quickly grew on me and I started looking for ways to try and do something about it.

In the past while experiencing slowness with Eclipse on Windows, I played with the memory allocation within it to increase the memory cap and this usually helped a bit. Being desperate, I decided to try that and off I went to try that. But, that was not so easy. I wandered a bit around the eclipse folder looking for the location of the eclipse.ini but it was nowhere to be found. So I tried searching for it – nop, no luck there as well.

Apparently eclipse.ini is packaged inside the eclipse app so what you need to do is to get inside the eclipse.app package

after that edit eclipse.ini which you will find in Contents->MacOS folder and increase the memory limits for the following directives:

-Xms***m

-Xmx***m

replace the *** with whatever memory you think should work for you as a rule of the thumb, just try to double it at first.

While this is good, this is NOT what will actually make your Eclipse fly. The most important part here is the:

-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.5

now, you have to switch that to 1.6 and make it

-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.6

Now THAT will make your Eclipse really shine! Just make sure you actually HAVE the JDK 1.6 installed. You can validate this by running “java -version” in the terminal. If you got 10.6 – Snow Leopard though, you are most likely covered.

If you already had that in the eclipse.ini file – well, unfortunately this already has been optimized for you and the only thing you can try from there that we know of is to play with the memmory limits.

If you know any other tips and tricks, please let me know in the comments!

BlackBerry Eclipse plugin 1.1 will fix some of the annoying problems

Inteist — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 03:20:59 +0000

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)

BlackBerry development with Eclipse plugin – fixing corrupted *.jdp file

Inteist — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 15:08:02 +0000

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:

Delete the *.jdp file (you can just rename it to *.jdp.OLD)
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”
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.