A Legacy Notes Developer's journey into madness.

Learning XPages

eclipse Frustrations (why do I suddenly have 18K+ errors?)

Devin Olson  March 14 2013 05:59:38 AM
Yesterday I had the incredibly frustrating experience of having eclipse break -and I had no idea why.   I spent several hours trying to figure it out before giving up and walking away.  

I had previously (with the help of Declan Lynch) set up a new installation of the eclipse IDE so I could do some XPages Plug-In development using the OpenNTF XPages Extension Library, and it was working great.   I saved my stuff and shut down eclipse.  

Later on I launched eclipse and found myself looking at a sea of red decorators, there were over 18,000 errors showing in my console.  

Now we all know how the "What Changed?" game works.  You get a call from a stupid end user who is having a problem with their computer.  So you ask the question "What did you change?", and the inevitable answer is always some variation of "nothing", or "I didn't do anything".   Which of course we as computer people know is complete crap.   Obviously they changed something, otherwise the darn thing wouldn't be broken.  

So I wracked my brain trying to figure out what had changed -and could not come up with anything.  I had not touched eclipse, nor had I touched any of the files that eclipse needed for my environment.  In the interim I had been working on a completely different machine.  So  I really had changed nothing.

Yet it was still broken.  Try as I might I couldn't get it working.  (Yes, I JFGI'd it, and no, I couldn't figure out the problem).   I knew that some required resources were not available -the IDE was complaining that it couldn't resolve the import com.ibm.xsp.library.AbstractXspLibrary (actually it couldn't even resolve com.ibm.xsp), but even though I KNEW the resources were there I couldn't get it to work.  It was late in the day and I was frustrated and angry so I just shut it down and walked away (after appropriate bitching on http://www.facebook.com/default.xsp, of course).

This morning my boss pinged me and helped me identify and fix the problem.   The fix was so incredibly simple that I just had to post it here.  

You see, I installed the latest version of eclipse Juno:  Eclipse Java EE IDE for Web Developers.  Version: Juno Service Release 2 Build id: 20130225-0426, and it seems there is a problem with this version in that it occasionally  forgets the target platform.  

Absolutely maddening.  

Here is how to fix this, should it happen to you.  





1) Open your eclipse window preferences
2) Expand Plug-in Development and click on Target Platform.  Then select your platform and click the reload button.  Then click the OK button.


That's it.  Eclipse will rebuild your workspace and you should be good to go.


Hope this helps!
-Devin.