This page last changed on Aug 09, 2006 by alan.cassar.

1. Setting Your Eclipse start up parameters

You can pass a number of command-line parameters to Eclipse to alter the start up behaviour. We recommend the following options-

Parameter Description
-clean Enables clean registration of plug-in (some plug-ins do not always register themselves properly after a restart)
-nosplash Don't show eclipse or plug-in splash screens
-showLocation puts the full path of the workspace in the window title
-vm Allows you to explicitly set which JDK to use
-vmargs Allows you to pass in standard VM arguments

For example under Windows, right click your eclipse shortcut and select properties and set the Target field to something like -

C:\java\eclipsehome\eclipse\eclipse.exe -clean -nosplash -showLocation -vm C:\java\jdk1.5.0_03\bin\javaw.exe
-vmargs -Xms128m -Xmx512m -XX:MaxPermSize=128m  -Duser.language=en

Please understand that these values are only examples - in this case for a very beefy developer machine. Eclipse 3.2 uses a lot less memory than 3.1, so you  most likely need a lot less VM heap memory than -Xmx512m.

2. Create an external plugins location

Having your plug-ins installed outside of your eclipse installation directory means that you can share plug-ins between versions of Eclipse. There is a good blog post by Colin Sampa about how to do this.

3. Importing multiple projects

The Eclipse import wizard doesn't search for existing projects below 1 directory from its parent. This can be a little annoying, but luckily the Eclipse Tools project at SourceForge has a plug-in that allows you to import all project below a parent directory. You can add the Eclipse-Tools plug-ins in the Eclipse Update Manager using this URL - http://eclipse-tools.sourceforge.net/updates/.

Once installed -

  1. Make sure Project -> Build Automatically is turned off (for now). This can speed up the entire process.
  2. Go to the menu File -> Import
  3. In the import dialog, go to the Other folder.
  4. Select Multiple Projects.
  5. Follow the on-screen prompts to import all your projects in one go.
  6. Eclipse will now take quite a while (up to several minutes) to rebuild the workspace; this is related to the Subversion plugin (if installed).
  7. If workspace reconstruction has completed, you can switch Project -> Build Automatically to on again, if you want to.

4. Recommended resources to ignore for team synchornisation

When you import Mule projects into your workspace, Eclipse will usually mark with a star (on a black background) resources which you might have modified. Some resources will be modified immediately by Eclipse as soon as you import the projects. This lead Eclipse to mark all projects as changed, giving you hard time to identify which resources you have really changed and which were changed by Eclipse.

This problem can be solved easily by telling Eclipse to ignore some type of resources in relation to team synchonisation. This can be done as follows:

In the menu bar, choose Window --> Preferences and a new Dialog Box will pop out. On the left hand, choose Team --> Ignored Resources and add all the patters you would like to ignore.

Some suggested patters to ignore include:
target
.settings
.classpath
.project
.mule
junit*.properties
*.log.*

Document generated by Confluence on Oct 03, 2006 09:23