A small rant about Netbeans & Eclipse Updating

I read another blog this evening that mentioned dissatisfaction with the Netbeans update manager. This echoes the thoughts I've had for quite awhile now for both Eclipse and Netbeans.

I am current running Eclipse 3.3M5 and the latest Netbeans 6 milestone (i forget the milestone number). Unless I am missing something (and i would be happy for that to be true), there is no way to update the core modules from within the update center.

Why is that functionality missing? Is it too hard to code, or am I the only one that would like it?

I dont want to have to download a brand new install to get the latest daily build of either IDE. I would like to be able to use the Update Manager to download the latest daily core modules. As far as I know, if i want to try out the latest daily build every day, I would need to redownload the entire IDE every morning. Is that really the case, or am I overlooking something obvious?


Is there a way, in either IDE, to download the latest DAILY build, from WITHIN the IDE, restart, and *poof* now I've got the latest build..no re-download/reinstall of the entire IDE required?

(Note..I'm just referring to the core IDE itself in this post, not any of the plugins, as the plugin updating works just fine).

Upgrading tips from Webwork 2.2 to Struts 2 Part 1

I've begun the process of upgrading our site from WebWork 2 to Struts 2. There is a guide on the Struts2 site detailing most of the migration tasks here.

The list below are some additional changes I had to make:

struts.xml changes (was xwork.xml)

1) Change dtd to:
<!DOCTYPE struts PUBLIC
"-//Apache Software Foundation//DTD Struts Configuration 2.0//EN"
"http://struts.apache.org/dtds/struts-2.0.dtd">
2) change <xwork> root to <struts>
3) Remove <include file="webwork-default.xml">...it appears struts-default.xml is included for you
4) packages extend struts-default instead of webwork-default
5) Add the following to any package using tiles:

<result-types>
<result-type name="tiles" class="org.apache.struts2.views.tiles.TilesResult">
</result-type>

web.xml changes:
1) Add the following after the filter mappings:
<listener>
<listener-class>org.apache.struts2.tiles.StrutsTilesListener</listener-class>
</listener>

Miscellaneous

1) Renamed tiles-config.xml to tiles.xml
2) In all jsps, convert webwork tag include to: <%@ taglib prefix="ww" uri="/struts-tags" %>
note: i left the prefix as ww for now, to avoid a bunch of renaming. Once the code is stable after the migration, i'll convert the tag prefixes to s: instead of ww:

Making the changes above has worked for several of the pages, but i havent tested things in depth yet. I just know i can get my pages to render. Next step is to begin testing functionality. I havent tested the tiles pages yet, and have noticed a couple of changes i'll need to make when upgrading to the new struts tags (i've found that the url tag seems to append params by default now. I dont believe it did this in webwork).

As I get further into the migration..i'll post more as i run into other lower level code changes that we had to make.