MyEclipse IDE
General
MyEclipse is a plugin collection/ide based on the Eclipse IDE, therefore all the general info regarding Eclipse IDE can be applied in here as well, however, thanks to the extensive support of web applications and JSF, we have many things, which simplify the usage of MyFaces under this IDE.
General web JSF application development
MyEclipse in its current incarnation comes with MyFaces 1.0.9 support out of the box. All which has to be done, is to generate a new java project, then via the project context menu choose
MyEclipse->add web nature
and then MyEclipse->add jsf nature
the rest of this process is a number of wizards, which are documented in the MyEclipse documentation.
Various tools which ease the development
Although MyEclipse does not have features as extensive as the drag and dropping in Exadel, or the various auto generated bindings, in Studio Creator and JDeveloper, it has a number of features, which ease the development of JSF applications. Those features mainly are:
improved xml editors
visual pageflow editors
a split view html editor (currently windows only)
basic uml tools for easier modelling
code snippets for easier handling of code templates
Spring IDE integration for combined jsf spring projects
Those tools often are somewhat basic, but they help to keep track of the various config files, and also the split view html editor can help a lot.
Have in mind, that some of those tools only work in Windows only, at the time of writing, if a multiplatform solution which also works under other OSses is needed, Exadel probably is the better choice, if you need good html editing capabilities.
Editing and debugging of the MyFaces sources
Once you have connection to the MyFaces SVN server as described in the Eclipse IDE Eclipse howto you simply can checkout the current folder as MyEclipse web project, all the needed folders and config files will be added by the MyEclipse plugin.
After the intial dialog is confirmed, another one with the web project specific settings is opened, this one can be altered to the personal liking, because the needed web.xml files and jars will be altered by the MyFaces jars generated from ant anyway.
After the checkout is done, a project structure similar to the one shown in the screenshot should be visible.
note the webapp structure at the bottom, at the current stage, it does not have any JSF personality. To reach the necessary editing capabilites, the needed JSF functionality has to be added manually by right clicking on the project MyEclipse->Add JSF capabilities to project....
The needed config file entries and libraries will be added to the project
The next step is to replace the libraries and config file entries with the newly generated ones, this can be done similarily to what is described in the general Eclipse page Eclipse IDE.
After that we only have to add the source folders, as described in the Eclipse page and we are ready for editing and debugging (do not forget to adjust the classpath of your project to the new jars).
(*Note, if you get intial errors in the sourcecode, you have to add the jstl.jar generated by the ant built to your project, then you only should have a handful of xml errors which you safely can ignore)