Apache Velocity is a commonly used template engine. It is already quite old (or should I say, mature) and hasn’t had an update for years. It is still widely used for building e-mail templates and web sites simply because it does what it promises to do: simple templating. I’ve been using Velocity for years and use Veloedit as a plugin for Eclipse.
Since Eclipse Luna came out, most of the existing velocity plugins stopped working. This is partly due to the removal of 2.0 plugin style support which is used by most old plugin’s. This is easily fixed by adding that support again via the update site.
Another problem seems to arise from the dependency of Eclipse m2e on Velocity 1.5.0 while most editors are based on 1.6.0. Since there can be only one version in the OSGi runtime, it causes a problem if you want to use m2e and a velocity editor. Veloedit is such a plugin. Luckily, it seems that the Veloeclipse editor simply embeds the velocity engine and as such has no problem.
Summarizing, if you want a working Velocity editor in Eclipse Luna, these are the steps:
- install 2.0 plugin support via
- Help > Install New Software
- Select the ‘Eclipse Project Updates’ site:
http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/4.4/ - You will find ‘Eclipse 2.0 Style Plugin Support’ in the ‘Eclipse Tests, Examples and Extras’ section
- Install VeloEclipse
- Help > Install New Software
- Select: http://veloeclipse.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/update/
Note:
When you run into errors like ‘No repository found containing’ you can un-check the box ‘Contact all update sites during install to find required software’ as per this answer on stackoverflow.
Read more:
