Sharing an Eclipse shell with the Web Experience Factory Designer and Worklight Studio

These are the steps you need to follow to share an eclipse development environment with both Web Experience Factory 8.0 and Worklight Developer Edition 5.0. There are many different versions and configurations of eclipse and many do not contain all the plugins required for both Worklight and Web Experience Factory. These steps have been tried and found that since the currently supported version of eclipse for Web Experience Factory is Eclipse 3.6.2 for windows we only support the 32 bit version and Worklight needs the complete web tools J2ee plugin set. This is the easiest way to get an eclipse they both share.

The version of Eclipse and plugins we include in our version of Eclipse that is distributed with our product doesn't include all the plugins that are required by Worklight. But there is a way to have both products share the same Eclipse. These are the steps to accomplish this .

Open the IBM developerWorks mobile website
https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mobile/

Choose the Link to download and install Worklight Developer Edition 5.0
When the page is displayed choose the Alternative install option


At the bottom of this page there is the information on installing the product into the Helios version of Eclipse.

It is very important that the version for Web Experience Factory 7.0.1 or 8.0 is Eclispe 3.6.2



The link for Helios that I used when writing this article was found here
There is also extra info on the support site for installing worklight into an existing eclipse here

The Helios SR2 for Java EE developers is the version that both products can share.
After unzipping the Eclipse you can install Worklight by either method from there update site or the zip format described on the alternate install option tab.



Update site location I used was http://public.dhe.ibm.com/ibmdl/export/pub/software/mobile-solutions/worklight/wdeupdate/

After getting the Worklight product setup you can install Web Experience Factory into the Eclipse that you just setup by choosing to customize the install and select an existing Eclipse. A shortcut to the install is if you already have your Web Experience Factory 8.0 installed is to copy the links folder from your previous install into the Eclipse directory that you just created. If you did a default install on windows it normally would be at C:\IBM\Web Experience Factory\Eclipse\links. This folder should already exist, Worklight places it's .lnk file in there also, so you should say yes to the overwrite dialog. If the link folder doesn't exist in the Eclipse directory just copy the links folder from the Experience Factories Eclipse directory.

You now should be able to create a workspace that contains both Worklight projects and Web Experience Factory projects. If the Web Experience Factory Perspective does not show up in the Window/ Open Perspective dialog you might need to add the -clean to the command line to start eclipse. This will cause eclipse to reload any new plugins.



Important JRE information
One note both products use Java 1.6 Web Experience Factory is designed to use the IBM JRE version to deploy to Portal without installing security certificates. If the mobile target platforms tool does not support the IBM JRE then you can update that JRE to have your server's certificate added to the key store which will allow Web Experience Factory to work using the updated JRE.

To add your certificate to the key store you need to get the certificate onto your system. you can do that by following the steps described in this article.
Adding Security Certificates to a Deployment Server for Outbound Requests
for information on updating the JRE you should follow the JRE's instructions to update the JRE's key store.
Following these instructions I generated this file C:/portal.cer by exporting the certificate from IE as described in the referenced Security topic.

For example I installed the Oracle JRE onto my windows system in the default location. And to update the JRE I opened a command window and set C:/Program Files/Java/jre6/bin directory as the current directory.
I then and ran this command
keytool -import -alias portal -keystore "C:/Program Files/Java/jre6\lib/security/cacerts" -file C:/portal.cer

After doing this you can run eclipse, open or create a project and deploy your application to portal.