SP5 offers IBM Portal Server ArcGIS Portlet development

eleanord — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 18:44:00 GMT

ArcGIS Server 9.2 Service Pack 5 includes an enhancement to the ArcGIS Server Java ADF which provides support for IBM Portal Server ArcGIS Portlet development. This gives you the ability to create and publish GIS Mapping Portlets inside IBM Portal Server. In conjunction, SP5 includes a plug-in for the IBM Rational Application Developer (RAD) environment so that you can create and deploy those ArcGIS Portlets more efficiently. The following documents have been added related to this SP5 enhancement.

New article - Install ArcGIS RAD plug-in
Programming language(s): Java
Development platforms: ArcGIS Server
After installing SP5 you will neeed to update the IBM RAD IDE to leverage the ArcGIS RAD plug-in. This article walks you through that process.

New article - Developing ArcGIS Portlet applications in RAD
Programming language(s): Java
Development platforms: ArcGIS Server
This article takes you through the basic steps required to create an ArcGIS Portlet application using the plug-in. The sample application displays a map, toolbar, table of contents, map overview, results, results details, and an empty task pane.

Eclipse plug-in to help Java developers debug their ArcObjects code

eleanord — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 01:09:00 GMT

(The following post was contributed by Divesh Goyal and the Java development team)

Updated 4/14/08 - Added link to a downloadable ZIP file containing the plug-in.

New tool - Eclipse plug-in for debugging Java ArcObjects code
Programming language(s): Java
Development platforms: ArcGIS Engine, ArcGIS Server

As we approach another developer summit, I am glad to announce the availability of an Eclipse plug-in for ArcGIS Server and ArcGIS Engine Java Developers that will greatly simplify debugging ArcObjects code.

About the plug-in

One of the most invaluable tools that developers have at their disposal is a debugger through which they can step through code one statement at a time and inspect objects in the application. As most of you may already know, java classes in the ArcObjects API are really only proxies to underlying COM ArcObjects. As a result, examining these proxies in the debugger only reveals their internal details and not the state of the ArcObjects. This makes it difficult to find out information such as the co-ordinates of an Geometry, or the Layers in a MapServer. Consequently, developers have to sprinkle their code with System.out.printlns and analyze traces on the console to get this information. This approach is inconvenient and time consuming.

With this new Eclipse plug-in, Java developers can examine the state of the underlying ArcObjects right in Eclipse IDE's Debug Perspective by enabling the "Show Logical Structure" option on the Expression and Variables window. Here’s an example of a Point object without the “Show Logical Structure” option enabled.

This information fails to provide any valuable insight into the underlying ArcObject and is not helpful in reasoning through a workflow while debugging. Now here’s the logical representation of the same object using the “Show Logical Structure” option enabled.

The logical representation presents more comprehensible information about the underlying ArcObject's state. This state is defined by the no-argument getter methods on it. You might sometimes see exception messages like “Exception Occurred: com.sun.jdi.InvocationException occurred invoking method” in the logical representation. This is normal and happens when some property of the ArcObject is not valid in the current context of the application.

The underlying ArcObjects could be running remotely in a separate process as in the case of ArcGIS Server web applications, or in the same process like in ArcGIS Engine applications. Thus, both Engine and Server developers can take advantage of this plug-in to debug their applications. I am very excited to share this plug-in with you, and look forward to your feedback. Code on!

How to get the plug-in

Follow these steps to download and install the plug-in from the EDN Website:

In the Eclipse workbench, go to Help > Software Updates > Find and Install
Select Search for new features to install, and click Next
Create a New Remote Site for the URL “http://downloads.esri.com/EDN/java/plugins/eclipse”
Enable this remote site and click Finish.
Expand the EDN tree in Search Results, and select the ArcGIS Debug feature.
Proceed to install the plug-in, and restart the workbench when prompted.

Added 4/14/08 - If you are unable to access the plug-in from the URL in Step 3 above, we have also made it available as a downloadable ZIP file here.

EDN Website Blog : Java

SP5 offers IBM Portal Server ArcGIS Portlet development

Eclipse plug-in to help Java developers debug their ArcObjects code