Installing NWDS Plugins on a vanilla eclipse

[rosh]

A collegue asked whether it is possible to update a standard eclipse with the NWDS features. I've taken some time to give it a try and the short answer is "kind of" - a win32 eclipse 3.3 works just fine, on amd64 linux the NWDI and Web Dynpro Features are not available. So if you still care here are the installation steps:

 

Assuming that the current versions will not support the NWDS plugins step one is to grab, extract and boot a vintage eclipse 3.3 from the eclipse archive.



Once eclipse is running you need to enter the NWDS update policy URL. SAP is hosting one at https://nwds.sap.com/swdc/downloads/updates/netweaver/nwds/ce/710/policy.xml. Using this will get the most recent 7.10 support packages. For sticking sticking with the NWDS SP at your server SP you might set up you own update site. Personally I'm always using the latest version from SAP and have never faced any issues because of that.

 

Next go to Help->Software Updates->Find and Install. If you're downloading from the SAP site you'll be asked for your S-User account in a popup. If you have problems getting here check eclipse's preferences for the proxy settings - one might be needed to access the internet.



 

Once you found and entered your credentials select "Search for new features to install" and select the policy site for the search. It might take a while until results are displayed.



 

The search results will show the current plugins, select all of them and keep pushing next and accepting licenses until eclipse restarts after successful installation.



 

et voilà: you've "enhanced" a clean eclipse installation with the newest NWDS plugins.



Remember to run eclipse on a jdk instead of jre because this is required by some of the tools.

 

On linux the steps are the same, but some of the plugins are not available:



I've heard that there's some ActiveX in the Web Dynpro designer, so that's out right from the start. The missing NWDI client support is a bit off to me, but the JEE & CE tools are probably worth having.