Alongside the Photoshop CS3 public beta, Adobe pushed another application to Labs the other day: JSEclipse, a JavaScript/Ajax editor for Eclipse by the former Interakt Online.

I thought I'd give it a shot so I downloaded it from Labs and tried to install it as per the instructions in Install.txt. Step 4 in the installation instructions states: "Copy the plugins folder from the folder where the archive was unzipped in the root Eclipse folder. This will not overwrite any existing plugins. It will simply copy the required files in the existing plugins folder." Although this behavior is correct for Windows, on OS X, your plugins folder *will* be replaced. So I decided to follow the "alternative instructions" instead, which used the Software Updates feature in Eclipse to install the plugin from the downloaded archive file. Unfortunately, this resulted in quite a few errors and simply didn't work.

Next, I tried to install the plugin remotely:

1. Open up your Eclipse installation (I ran this on version 3.2 with the FDT plug-in installed)
2. Go to Help → Software Updates → Find and Install...
3. Click the radio button next to Search for new features to install, followed by the Next button.
4. Click the New Remote Site button
5. In the New Update Site dialog box that appears, enter JSEclipse for the name (or anything else, really, that's just for your benefit) and the following address in the URL field: http://www.interaktonline.com
6. Click OK and let the updater run. It will ask you to restart the Workbench and you should be done.

Once installed, I went to Window → Customize Perspective and saw a new Shortcut Category called AJAX. Unfortunately, creating a new JSClass resulted in an error: "The selected wizard could not be started. Reason: Plug-in com.interaktonline.jseclipse was unable to load class com.interaktonline.jseclipse.ui.newwizard.JSClass".

At this point, I gave up. I'm assuming this is a Mac issue. I'll try the original manual installation instructions later when I have some more time.

The JSEclipse: A new Eclipse plugin from Adobe Labs article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.