To use eclipse with Maven you need to add the maven plugin to eclipse, it seems to be part of the Indigo update site so this should be straightforward.

It’s also at http://download.eclipse.org/technology/m2e/releases

More instructions at http://maven.apache.org/guides/mini/guide-ide-eclipse.html

To run the debugger you need to do two things: you need to tell maven to run surefire, and run a remote java debug listening to that surefire

This worked for me today - saving it here so I can find it again

http://off-topic.biz/en/eclipse-hangs-at-startup-showing-only-the-splash-screen/

It’s been a while since I’ve worked on a project which is providing as well as consuming web services.

In this case I need to debug incoming requests that are not initiated from with the browser (I’m using soapui as a test tool).

In order to allow Eclipse to pick up xdebug responses triggered by requests from soapui I just needed to

xdebug is an immensely powerful tool for exploring what your code really does.

You can get a long way using print_r but ultimately this always requires that you predict the path your code will take - and the tricky bit about debugging is you need it when your predications have gone wrong.

It’s generally pretty easy to set up

Version conflicts to be aware of

Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) now ships with Subversion 1.5

You can’t use a svn 1.4 client and a svn 1.5 client on the same working copy.

Having just upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10 my key observation is that it’s important to read the release notes first.

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/810

There are a few bugs which have affected me

One of the surprising things about Drupal is that it doesn’t use object oriented coding.

There’s a good page in the Drupal documentation about this

http://api.drupal.org/api/file/developer/topics/oop.html

It makes a good case for the design of Drupal, and goes a long way to explain why Drupal feels more OO than the code looks at first glance.

Well the new version of Eclipse (3.4 or Ganymede) is out and I’ve been trying it out. So far I’ve just installed it, adding in the components I want; and generally trying to see what’s new.

If you try to access a subversion repository over http while using a 3G connection from three.co.uk you may receive an error message like.

svn: PROPFIND request failed on ‘/repos’ svn: Processing PROPFIND request response failed: Premature end of file. (/repos)

This is because three.co.uk uses a proxy to interecept web traffic on their network.

Using doc-comments in Eclipse really helps productivity by providing lots of tool-tip help and auto completion.

A colleague recently pointed out that Eclipse can auto-complete object properties (as long as you use the @property tag). I’ve found this really helpful and have been creating objects to return pass around - and found it a vwery neat way of working.