WebMethods Designer 8 with eclipse 3.6

SoftwareAG’s webmethods designer 8, the eclipse based replacement for “Developer” comes packaged into a rather old version of eclipse, 3.4. if you’d rather use it with, say, 3.6, here’s what you need to do…

Install it as it likes, then open up c:\softwareAG\eclipse\updates. This is the goodness :)

Start up your eclipse 3.6, and under “help->install new software” choose “add” then “archive” and find first of all, the com.softwareag.common.zip and install it. The feature should install happily there.

But, to install the DeveloperPlugins.zip, you need to do a bit of hackery.

Inside the zip, open up features/com.softwareag.is.feature_8.1.0.0000-0193.jar, and then open up com.softwareag.is.feature_8.1.0.0000-0193.jar (your version may differ, but it should be much the same)
Then, open up feature.xml and you’ll see the following list of requirements:

   <requires>
      <import feature="org.eclipse.gef" version="3.4.0" match="greaterOrEqual"/>
      <import feature="org.eclipse.wst" version="3.0.0" match="greaterOrEqual"/>
      <import feature="org.eclipse.jst" version="3.0.0" match="greaterOrEqual"/>
      <import feature="org.eclipse.platform" version="3.4.2" match="greaterOrEqual"/>
   </requires>

Unfortunately, org.eclipse.wst and org.eclipse.jst don’t exist anymore, they’ve been broken up into smaller pieces, and renamed.

Remove those two lines from the requires list, and replace them with this:

   <requires>
      <import feature="org.eclipse.gef" version="3.4.0" match="greaterOrEqual"/>
      <import feature="org.eclipse.wst.ws_core.feature" version="3.2.0" match="greaterOrEqual"/>
      <import feature="org.eclipse.jst.web_core.feature" version="3.2.0" match="greaterOrEqual"/>
      <import feature="org.eclipse.jst.enterprise_core.feature" version="3.2.0" match="greaterOrEqual"/>
      <import feature="org.eclipse.jst.server_core.feature" version="3.2.0" match="greaterOrEqual"/>
      <import feature="org.eclipse.platform" version="3.4.2" match="greaterOrEqual"/>
   </requires>

Save your way all the way back out, and then use this zip as a software source as before, and the new feature should install just fine :)

You may not need all three jst.XXXX_core features, but this was enough to get it working for me.

oh, You’ll know you need this, if you get the following errors when you try and install from the original .zip files.


Ack, try and get back to the initial state where this didn't work to catch the whole error message to make googling easier.

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