How to get your own local copy of the Infocenter

If I’m going out to meet a customer, I’ll always make sure to have a local copy of the infocenter on hand in case I have to look something up.

Luckily enough, there’s an easy way to do this. The infocenters for WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere Portal are available in Eclipse Help System form, which is pretty much the same way they are presented over the web.

You can download the infocenter in Eclipse Help System format from this page for WAS and this page for Portal.

If you don’t have Eclipse already, download it from here. Any one of the versions should do. Unzip Eclipse and then copy the infocenter zips into the eclipse/plugins directory. Then unzip the infocenter zips in the plugins directory.

Now start Eclipse, and pick any old workspace. Click Help -> Help Contents, and the Infocenter zips that you copied in should be along side any other help files that come with Eclipse originally.

Now you have a local copy, make sure to update it since the infocenter is updated monthly.

Eclipse + flash drive = IDE anywhere

I’m taking a introduction to Java course at night school at the moment.  I’ve bought so many ‘Learn Java in 15 minutes’ books and they just sit on the shelf and get dusty. So the class is supposed to make me work at it.

In the class we all are giving nice little windows PCs, and they all have NetBeans 6.5 installed on them. Nothing against NetBeans, but everyone at work uses Eclipse, and I’ve played with Eclipse quite a bit so I didn’t really want to learn NetBeans.

Since the course is held in one of the most treacherous IT environments imaginable (a school!) with every wiseass trying to hack the machines, they are locked down pretty tight. So I didn’t imagine I’d be able to install Eclipse. Also, since you weren’t assigned a specific computer for each session, installing it each time on a different machine wasn’t going to be an option.

I guess you read the title, so know what’s going to come next. I dumped a build of Ganymede onto a crappy flash drive at home and took it to class. Eclipse ran just great off the drive. The particular flash drive has terrible r/w speeds too. I really thought it wouldn’t work well at all. Just make sure you create your workspace on the flash drive too (duh). Now I can work from the same development environment where ever I am. The only caveat I guess is that it has to be the same OS (Wndows, in my case). I’m sure there is some way to launch a Windows build of Eclipse on Linux, but it would be hard to figure out. Too much mucking around with the classpath.