Eclipse Orion on Mac OSX and iPad

Yesterday I blogged about setting up Eclipse Orion on MAc OSX and trying to access it from an iPad. Today I continue my exploration and share some comments on setup tuning and clarifications of the as yet sparse documentation on the Orion Eclipsepedia.

Stopping the server on Mac OSX doesn't work

When you startup up Orion as instructed in the wikiit starts up without access to the console. You can see all the log messages by starting up the Console application, but you cannot tell Orion to close. To enable keyboard access to the osgi console, you need to do the following:

• Open the eclipse package using control-click and Show Package Contents.
  Create an alias to the file Contents/MacOS/eclipse.
  
• Rename this alias to eclipse-orion to the root folder.
  
• Now you can double click the alias and orion is started but you have access to the osgi console in a Terminal window.
  
• To stop and shutdown orion simple type close in the Terminal window.

Orion accessed from iPad doesn't work

I can open files and view them and move around with the outline bar at the left, but as yet I have failed to activate editing mode on a file. Clicking in the text or scrolling by dragging doesn't work. I suspect that the HTML used simply does not activate the keyboard on an iPad.
I think it is time to checkout the code...

Eclipse Orion first impressions and setup for iPad

As iPad doesn't support Java, there is no Eclipse on it, until now!
Because the iPad comes with Safari, a very good standards compliant webkit based browser, looking for a web based IDE does indeed make sense. So I'm very excited about the Orion announcement as can be found here, here and here.

Installing and starting is easy

Download from http://download.eclipse.org/e4/orion/. I choose the version for Mac OSX. It extracts into a folder named eclipse that I renamed immediately to eclipse-orion to avoid confusion with all the other versions installed on my machine.

Setting the server port to other than 8080

Port 8080 is already taken on my system I needed to edit the config.ini file and change the org.eclipse.equinox.http.jetty.http.port variable.
For Mac OSX select eclipse and right mouse click to to show package contents:

Then locate config.ini inside the Contents/MacOS folder.

Then edit to choose the port that is free.

-startup
../../../plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.2.0.v20101119.jar
--launcher.library
../../../plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.cocoa.macosx_1.1.100.v20101004
-consoleLog
-console
-data
serverworkspace
-vmargs
-Dorg.eclipse.equinox.http.jetty.http.port=8888
-Dorg.eclipse.equinox.http.jetty.autostart=false
-XstartOnFirstThread
-Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.carbon.smallFonts

Fire up your iPad (simulator)

Open the iPad simulator, start Safari and go the URL http://ip-address-of-dev-machine:8888/ and see the workspace.

Now you can edit files of your mobile website and save and see them in action right on the couch.

Next time: hooking up to an existing workspace.