Enhance Your Echo2 Application with EchoPointNG Components

Introduction

Echo2 is a Java Web Application Framework developed by NextApp. Echo2 makes it easy to develop highly responsive, AJAX based web applications (for more information, see Resources). EchoPointNG (EchoPoint, Next Generation) is a library of additional components for Echo2, it is a port of the EchoPoint component library for the original Echo framework. There is a link to a live demo showcasing the components discussed at the end of the article.

Disclaimer: Currently the Echo2 framework is in Release Candidate status. EchoPointNG has not been officially released and may contain bugs, use at your own risk.

Obtaining And Building EchoPointNG

Currently, EchoPointNG is only available via CVS, to get it, point your cvs client to cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/echopoint/echopointng, using a connection type of "pserver", "anonymous" as the user name and a blank password.

EchoPointNG comes bundled with an ANT build file, unfortunately it does not work out of the box when using the latest version of Tomcat. To build EchoPointNG with Tomcat 5.5.9, open the included build.properties
CATALINA_HOME=/java/tomcat-4.1.24

Substitute the value with your the directory for your Tomcat installation, next, look for a line that looks like this:

javax_servlet_jar=/java/tomcat-4.1.24/common/lib/servlet.jar

Again, change the value to the location of your Tomcat installation, and change the filename from servlet.jar to servlet-api.jar. EchoPointNG needs the JSP API in its classpath as well, which the servlet-api.jar jar file does not include. Add an additional line to build.properties that looks like this:

javax_jsp_jar=/opt/tomcat/jakarta-tomcat-5.5.9/common/lib/jsp-api.jar
Substitute the location as appropriate for your Tomcat installation. Next, open build.xml, and look for a section that looks like this:

 <path id="library_class_path">
	<pathelement location="projects/jar/bin"/> 
 <pathelement location="${javax_servlet_jar}"/> 
 <pathelement location="${echo_app_jar}"/>
 <pathelement location="${echo_webcontainer_jar}"/> 
 <pathelement location="${echo_webrender_jar}"/> 
 <pathelement location="${junit_jar}"/> 
 </path>

Add a the following line anywhere between the <path> and </path> tags:

<pathelement location="${javax_jsp_jar}"/>

The default ANT target will generate a jar file named something like echopointng-2.0a5.jar, javadoc, a war file with a deployable web application demonstrating all of the EchoPointNG components. To develop applications using EchoPointNG, the echopointng-2.0a5.jar must be in the CLASSPATH (the exact name of the jar file will depend on the version of EchoPointNG downloaded.

Next: EchoPointNG Components

Enhance Your Echo2 Application with EchoPointNG Components var addthis_pub = "heffel";

Introduction

Obtaining And Building EchoPointNG

Enhance Your Echo2 Application with EchoPointNG Components