I tried to create a working project by using vaadin project wizard in Eclipse on Ubuntu without success.
I first ran the “sh start.sh” command. The content browser (http://localhost:8888/) seems to work ok.
Then in Eclipse, I tried to install target runtimes during wizard, but none of them installed. All required some dependencies which could not be found.
Ok, then I just ignored it since there was a checkbox “Create a new local server”. Then I tried to run the web app with following result: “The selection cannot be run on any server”.
Then I tried to inspect the project properties, and pressed the “Create development mode launch”. After that when pressing Run, a GWT started. But when trying to run the app in browser, i get this: “No data received. Unable to load the web page because the server sent no data. Error 324 (net::ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE): The server closed the connection without sending any data.”
I tried to import the demo project into Eclipse, and then I was able to run the demo ONCE as “Vaadin Development Server” (I was unable to create this run configuration for the wizarded project, tried to follow the steps here: http://vaadin.com/book/-/page/getting-started.quickstart.html. The “Vaadin Web Mode” was not visible in the configuration page). After closing the browser, the Run did not work anymore, since the port was still in use… I had to restart eclipse to run again, how convenient.
There is clearly something wrong with your Eclipse installation, some update sites are not configured but there is probably also something else broken. I am running Eclipse and the Vaadin plugin on Ubuntu without any problems whatsoever.
How did you install Eclipse? Which package? Which version?
For me, Helios and Indigo are working fine, both from JEE packages installed by extracting the ZIP contents (from eclipse.org) into my own directory.
I installed Eclipse via Synaptic Package Manager about a year ago. The Eclipse package installed appears to be “eclipse, 3.5.2-2ubuntu4.3”, according to Synaptic. I haven’t removed any update sites after installation, only added few sites for some plugins like maven, subclipse etc.
I would recommend installing Eclipse directly by extracting a recent ZIP rather than with Ubuntu package manager - it is very easy to do. The Ubuntu package (or any other linux bundled version) is updated rarely, gives less control over plug-ins and usually isn’t the bundle you would want anyway. While Eclipse has become much more Linux distribution friendly over the last 5 years, it is still far from being ideal for packaging in a Linux distribution if you want to do any customization.
Most likely, your Eclipse package isn’t the JEE bundle and some of the main update sites are disabled in it by default. While it is probably possible to configure everything (Eclipse application server adapters, update sites etc.) in it if you know what to do, I believe it would be much more work than manually installing a recent version of the Eclipse JEE bundle.
Would it be possible that the Vaadin project wizard would take care of the mandatory requirements and configuration, or at least warn about the misconfiguration it itself cannot handle?
Eclipse should actually take care of true plugin installation dependencies based on the requirements specified for the Vaadin plug-in, but note that the Vaadin plug-in does not (and should not) depend on any specific WTP server configurations etc. Those are up to the user to install if he wants to use them, especially if not using the JEE distribution package of Eclipse - the Vaadin plug-in for Eclipse cannot know what servers the user wants to use etc. Unfortunately, installing them after installing a non-JEE bundle of Eclipse does not result in them being configured the same way as when installing the JEE bundle, but this is purely an Eclipse WTP issue.
As for many other things like the presence of GWT JARs, the plug-in tries to check and fix what it can without overriding settings the user might want to have, and without causing too much overhead. There are some additional checks that could be made (like download checksums), but not that much.
I had to restart eclipse to run again, how convenient.