Release 2.8/3.8 Beta- Visual HTML Designer (WYSIWYG), HTML Tidy Integration, Enhanced CSS and new Java Script Editors, Struts Modeler, JSF Editor, SunOne Connectors and Dependent project deployment for Eclipse 2.x and 3.0 (6/1/2004)

Release History

2.7

Visual HTML Designer - Full featured editor / for WIN32

Improved HTML development through a multi page editor including:

Smart source editor
Real-time viewer for page rendering
Full-featured Visual design capabilities for WYSIWYG development with round-trip page display and code generation
Code formating and validation with error marking

Smart HTML Source Editor with Syntax checking and color coding

Visual HTML Designer - Real-time viewer and page rendering

Includes built-in browser for real-time rendering and one-click review of your page. You no longer need to launch a seperate browser or have to deploy to your server to test your code.

HTML preview with real-time rendering

Visual HTML Designer - Full-featured WYSIWYG Development

The designer includes an MS Office-like tool bar offering formating options and wizards for:

Create and modify tables and cells
Create and modify forms and field attributes. Form fields include checkbox, radio, input, text area, button, selection, image and hidden fields
Modify text attributes and layout options
Insert and edit images
Create anchor points
Inser horizantal lines and other special characters
Turn on and off page details and table borders

Visual HTML Designer


Ability to insert and modify tables by positioning the cursor where you want the table and selecting the "Insert Table" opition in the tool bar. You can modify table attributes by selecting the table and then through context sensitive right-click option
Rich cell confirguration options through context sensitive right click options.
Form and field creation and modification through rich context sensitive property dialogs or Tool Bar controls. Availabe "Form" fields include: Form Creation and Update Check boxes and Radio & Buttons Text Fields Selection Field Text Area and Hidden Field
Full Image handling capabilities including built-in local directory browser, image and text alignment as well as setup of relative image URL within your project.

Ad-hoc Image Preview

MyEclipse now offers a new view option allowing user to browse through their images directories (through package Explorer) and display image content without having to open in a separate image editor.

The image preview option offers basic image view/sizing , Zoom in / Zoom out and support GIF, JPG, BMP, PNG, ICO image types.

Future releases will integrate the viewer into the Visual editor for drag and drop as well as image editing capabilities

To enable this view, select Window -> Show View -> Other -> Image Preview

To display the image, simply select the image file in the package explorer view

Image viewer for GIF, JPG, BMP, PNG and ICO image types

Tidy Plugin Integration - Formatting, validation and error marking

Add significant HTML formatting capability through the integration of Eclipse Tidy into the Workbench source editor and Visual Designer.

In addition to formatting and cleaning up HTML documents, this new capability will validate your tags and provide line number annotation, right column marking for ease of navigation and detailed task list. You can also validate a single file through context sensitive option or all the HTML documents in your project.

HTML formating, validation, tidy and markup

The MyEclipse HTML Tidy feature also offers xtensive cofiguration option to customize formating, validation, annotation, markup and layout

Enhanced Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) Editor

New CSS editor offers a number of enhancements and features including:

Smart editor with content assist, syntax checking and color coding
An outline view for easy navigation
CSS property details

CSS editor, outline view and property details

Extensive customization and configuration options

CSS Editor configuration and customization

New JavaScript Editor

MyEclipse added a new JavaScript editor with baseline capabilities mainly for color coding. Additional features will be added in follow on releases based on user input.

New Java Script Editor with Color Coding

Enhanced Struts Flow Modeler

Java Server Faces Configuration Editor

JSF Preferences - user configurable JSF libraries and tag libraries

configure project configuration preferences

1) JSF project nature
2) JSF project wizards allow users to add JSF Capabilities to any MyEclipse Web Project

3) JSF Capabilities Wizard -

populates a web project with the required JSF tag libraries and jars
creates a default faces-config.xml
updates web.xml with Faces Servlet
4) JSF-JSP page creation wizard

This wizard template allows a user to create a JSP page configured with basic JSF taglibs

Dependent Project Deployment

Smart Deployment for Web Projects allows the user to configure how Java projects that are on a Web project's classpath are handled during deployment. With this release, any Java project that is on the classpath of a web project can be configured to be automatically packaged for any deployment of the web project. There is a global workspace setting to determine how the dependent projects are handled, but this setting may be overridden at the web project level.

A global workspace option sets the overall policy

but this policy may be overridden on a project by project basis

In this example, TomcatTest has three Java library projects that it uses

The full project structure looks like this

and when Smart Deployed to Tomcat looks like this

Of course, Smart Deployment is fully integrated with our Hot Sync deployer so all changes to code in dependent projects is automatically redeployed to all affected Web project deployments on all servers.