ARL Editor for Websphere

The ARL Editor is the first Eclipse-based tooling released for Able as we move our Swing development environment to Websphere. The com.ibm.able.ui zipfile must be separately downloaded from IBM alphaWorks and installed.

Prerequisites

Use Eclipse 2.0 or later drivers which can be obtained at Eclipse.org or downloading Websphere Studio Workbench 2.0 or by IBM personnel at Jumpstart.

Installation

Install the plugin by unzipping it into your Eclipse plugins directory such as:
C:\Program Files\ECLIPSE20\eclipse\plugins.

This release of the plugin includes the able.jar. Beans in able.jar are thus accessible from rulesets. Should you wish to make all beans accessible, copy the ablebeans.jar to replace able.jar in the directory plugins\com.ibm.able.ui_1.4.0.

Functions

The ARL Editor plugin consists of a custom editor for files of extension .arl, a debug console, and trace views.

Highlighting

Highlighting is specified for various lines and words and is currently not customizable. The highlighting scheme follows these rules of thumb:

Support

We are interested in any feedback you are willing to provide, whether it is problems you encounter while using this software or suggestions for future improvements. Please send comments and questions to ableinfo@us.ibm.com, post them in the Able discussion forum at http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/able, or the newsgroup news://forums.ibm.com/forums.software.able. Internal IBM users may post or subscribe to the software.able forum at http://w3.ibm.com/forums/forumlookup/forums.software.able.

Tips

User suggestions are as follows:

  1. If developing class files in conjunction with rulesets, convert the project you develop into a plugin project. Develop and debug your classes in this instance of Eclipse. Start a runtime workbench instance and use the ARL plugin editor in that Eclipse instance to debug your ruleset.
  2. Set the able.home property prior to starting Eclipse. On Windows this can be done by specifying vmargs in the target in the shortcut properties like this:
    "C:\Program Files\IBM\WebSphere Studio\wsappdev.exe" -vmargs -Dable.home=C:\able_1.5.0 -Dable.prefdir=C:\