I've recently picked up a new laptop, and in the process of setting it up for development purposes I've had some issues. Some are Windows 7 based, the others are Eclipse workspace related.

I thought I'd put together a short entry on the issues I encountered, and how I overcame them.

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I've been experiencing issues with my development setup, so I thought I'd write a blog entry to wrap up my findings, and try and gauge what the community is running. In this article I will detail what I use in my development environment, and how it is set up.

I've recently had errors occurring in my Eclipse IDE. There have been some very frustrating SVN client version incompatibilities, so I thought I would re install it. It turns out this was a common error (menu options in subclipse were not available) based on an incompatibility between the subclipse plug-in and the Aptana studio.

A detailed fix is in this blog entry: https://radrails.tenderapp.com/discussions/problems/173-synchronize-view-broken-after-upgrading-to-radrails-203

Software setup

I use the Eclipse Java IDE as my primary development application. Alongside this I use the CFEclipse plug-in for ColdFusion functionality, the Aptana Studio plug-in for CSS and JavaScript functionality. I also use the subclipse plug-in for SVN integration.

For Flex/AIR I use a standalone FLEX studio installation. This is pretty much a custom workspace in an Eclipse IDE. I only do this as I have had several issues trying to get FLEX installed into the regular Eclipse IDE.

I recently tried to switch to the 64 bit version of Eclipse, but it would not recognise my Java install, and from what I've read online you need to install a 64 bit version of Java. The only version of this I can find is flagged as "experimental" so I think I'll leave it well alone.

I've found it quite good to increase the default 256mb heap space in Eclipse to 512mb, there e is an article detailing how to edit the Eclipse ini file here: http://wiki.eclipse.org/FAQ_How_do_I_increase_the_heap_size_available_to_Eclipse%3F

Download links

Eclipse downloads: http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/

CFEclipse downloads: http://trac.cfeclipse.org/wiki/InstallingCfeclipse

Aptana downloads: http://www.aptana.org/studio/plugin

Subclipse downloads: http://subclipse.tigris.org/servlets/ProjectProcess?pageID=p4wYuA

I've recently tried to import some source from Gmail, and save it as a text file in Eclipse, but discovered an encoding issue that seemed strangely undocumented online.

When I was trying to save the imported source, I would receive an error message:

"Some characters cannot be mapped using 'Cp1252' character encoding".

It turns out that Gmail is using a wider spread of encoding than usual websites. Simply click on File-> Properties -> Text File Encoding -> and select another encoding format until you hit the right one. In my case it was UTF-8.

Then eclipse will save it!

I was directed to the Adobe Developer Connection site by a colleague the other day, and told to go look at 'Tour-de-Flex'.

Its an AIR/Web application that hosts a whole range of example FLEX and AIR resources.

Its also available as a handy eclipse plugin, if you are that way inclined :-)

I've had a brief look around it, and it looks pretty good, very handy having code examples and themes right there on your desktop.

Also gave me some interesting trains of thought of the next AIR application I have in mind....

I already use tortoise SVN and subclipse for Eclipse as a source control plugin. This handles the code base nicely, but I was recently sent this link for an ex-work colleague.

Pixelnovel is a web based source control application designed for photoshop.

It looks like a basic version is free, so I think I'll give it a whirl....

I must have gone through three or four different methods of installing an SVN shell, or plugin, or desktop application to interface with Eclipse. Most had strange configuration issues, and required intimate knowledge of SVN process's.

Thankfully I found this the other day, its a simple clean guide to installing subClipse into Eclipse, using the traditional 'Software Updates' menu method.

http://subclipse.tigris.org/install.html