OpenAM: Setup in Eclipse

When I found earlier this year that Eclipse does a pretty good job for XML editing, Eclipse became my IDE of choice. Download support for Subversion and Maven, and most of my tasks seem straightforward.

Except setting up OpenAM as a new project in Eclipse. Which I seem to do too often.

My first mistake is trying to set up from existing code checked out from https://svn.forgerock.org/openam/trunk/opensso. Next mistake is trying to check out the code from Subversion with New > Project… > SVN, and then getting confused, trying to use the existing Ant file under opensso/projects/build.xml.

In fact, what seemed to work for me is this (Eclipse 3.7.0). YMMV…

1. In Eclipse, New > Project… > SVN, etc.
   When Eclipse starts the wizard inside the wizard, New > Java Project in the directory where the sources will check out, and then Project name opensso (same as the file system directory).
2. Download the .zip of extlib dependencies from this Wiki page that will be used to replace opensso/products/extlib (but don’t do it yet).
3. Replace opensso/products/extlib with the content of the .zip.
4. Build the software first from the command line (cd opensso/products ; ant server-war).
5. In Eclipse, open opensso/products/build.xml, right-click the server-war target and Run As > Ant Build.

This leaves me with a project having too many folders, many errors, and warnings, but it works to build the server-war target from inside Eclipse… and work on docs under openam-site.