Setting up development environment with Eclipse - bluesoft-rnd/aperte-workflow-core GitHub Wiki

This tutorial shows the basic way of creating fully functional Aperte Workflow development environment with Eclipse IDE. Most important steps were described and covered here. However, it's assumed that one already is familiar with this work environment, because we do not provide screenshots and explanations for every operation.

This tutorial was prepared and tested on:

• Eclipse 3.6 Helios
• Windows 7 x86_64
• Oracle JDK 1.6u30 x86
• Liferay 6.0.6 bundled with Tomcat 6.0.29
• Apache Maven 3.0.3

1. Download Eclipse IDE. Although one can choose from many preconfigured bundles we suggest Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers because it comes with quite a lot of useful features already installed, some of which are essential during development in Aperte Workflow environment.
2. Install or unpack Eclipse (from now on, we refer to this directory as $ECLIPSE_HOME)
3. Make sure Eclipse is running using JDK. You can ensure this by adding -vm option to $ECLIPSE_HOME/eclipse.ini e.g.
   -vm C:/Program Files (x86)/Java/jdk1.6.0_30/bin

To speed up the development process by automating some common operations, one may want to consider installing few additional Eclipse IDE plugins.

Plugin home page

Entire Aperte Workflow Core is build with Maven.

Plugin home page

This plugin provides some useful features for developing Liferay specific projects, as well as provides integration with Your local portal installation. If You do not plan to manage Liferay instance from Your IDE it might not be needed.

Plugin installation guide

Provides graphical interface for designing processes with jPDL.

Plugin home page

Aperte Workflow Core is hosted with Git and one may want to access it's repository on Github. Otherwise, this plugin is not needed.

1. Download Liferay Portal. We suggest using Liferat Portal Community Edition 6.0.6 bundled with Tomcat for development environment. This is also the version we provide with our Aperte Workflow bundle.
2. Unpack Liferay Portal (from now on we refer to this directory as $LIFERAY_HOME).
3. Update Vaadin to the version used by Aperte Workflow.

Eclipse provides means to run and manage the J2EE application server directly from the IDE. This allows to integrate the runtime environment with configuration wizards, log console and some other handy tools. A more traditional approach, based on console scripts is described here.

1. Open File > New > Other ...
2. Select Server. Press Next.
3. Choose Liferay, Inc > Liferay v6.0 CE Server (Tomcat 6). Press Next.
4. Set Liferay Tomcat Directory to the root tomcat directory inside Liferay. Press Next.
5. The Liferay Tomcat bundle zip file option may be left blank, it's important only for Liferay development and not utilized in Aperte Workflow development process. Press Next.
6. The Add or Remove resources functionality is optional as well. Aperte Workflow utilizes OSGi to ensure modularity and hot deployment of its components. Press Finish.