Eclipse Integration on the MAC

Just in case people haven't discovered this easy way to edit OpenCMS file on Mac OS X with Webdav here goes.

Mount the webdav opencms filesystem using the Mac's normal connect to server dialog. This will create a mount under /Volumes. This was /Volumes/webdav in my case.

Now the contents of the VFS can be browsed just like any other mounted file system. Just to make life easy, add this mount to the login items in the account preferences pane in system preferences. That way the mount will be persistent across logins.

In eclipse create a project the you want to work in, say for a module. Inside this project create a folder called say src-module to hold the contents of the module.

Now the sneaky bit. From a terminal window create a soft link inside src-module folder to the module folder in the mount you created earlier. So, assuming you created a module in opencms called uk.co.mycompany.mymodule, then the ln command would be:

ln -s /Volumes/webdav/system/modules/uk.co.mycompany.mymodule /Users/myname/eclipsework/src-module/uk.co.mycompany.mymodule

Now in eclipse hit refresh and hey presto all the files in the VFS for the module are available to edit. Nows its as easy as editting the files as usual and saving in eclipse to update the files in opencms.

This should also work on linux although I havent tried it as yet.