WTP Europa Release

Eclipse Europa is the annual release of Eclipse projects of 2007. Here are some of my experience about it. Since I am using WTP mostly, my experience is mainly concerned with WTP.

Interesting, my WTP 2.0 can not start up with -Xmx1024m. But it is able to start up with a smaller maximum heap size, for instance, -Xmx768m. While my other Java application, such as Tomcat, has no problem with -Xmx1024m. I am using JDK 1.6.0_01. I posted a message at the eclipse.webtools newsgroup. I will follow this issue.

It is desirable that WS explorer has an extension point to support application domain service description document (non WSDL). WS explorer can be used as a UDDI browser. In UDDI data model, the service entity can be associated with a tModel, which is simply a link to some non-registered document that further describes the service, for instance, the WSDL of the service. WS explorer supports to retrieve the WSDL, visually display it, and even invoke its operations.

I am working on the Grimoires project, which is an extended UDDI service registry supporting metadata annotation and service discovery by interface signature. In our practice, we very often see that users design their own service description language, instead of WSDL, to describe their services. For instance, the myGrid project, an influential service-oriented bioinformatics experiment environment, uses its own Feta schema. GLUE is a popular schema to describe services and resources in grid computing.

explorer has an extension point to support application domain service description document (non- explorer to open it; if it points to some non-This is understandable. First, it is cheap to design an XML schema for their XML-based service description language. Second, it improves usability with a DSL (domain specific language) in place. According to UDDI' data model, the URL of domain specific service description documents can be put into a tModel, then associated with the service entity. Thus it is desirable that WSWSDL). That is, if the tModel points to WSDL, then WS explorer uses its embedded WSDLWSDL document, the WS explorer uses some extension registered corresponding explorer to visually handle it. Somehow UDDI's tModel can be considered as an extension point of UDDI data model, because it allows any document with a URL to be associated with a service.

The benefit of such an extension point in WS explorer is to improve usability by supporting domain-specific service description documents, which further enhances the expressiveness of service description: whether the description document is WSDL or non-WSDL, standard based or domain specific, current supported or emerging, all can be handled by WS explorer.

Another desirable feature is about being able to print visualized XSD/WSDL supports visualizing . WTPXSD/WSDL. The visualized result is very informative and is a good source to be put into documentation. But this is not supported a couple of years ago. It is very good that now WTP 2.0 supports printing visualized XSD! (Although I am not sure exactly since which version WTP has implemented this.) But the printed visualized XSD loses its icons standing for XSD attribute and element. And it still does not allow to print visualized WSDL. I am not sure whether there is some technical difficulty for printing contents of arbitrary editors.