Eclipse Orion first impressions and setup for iPad

As iPad doesn't support Java, there is no Eclipse on it, until now!
Because the iPad comes with Safari, a very good standards compliant webkit based browser, looking for a web based IDE does indeed make sense. So I'm very excited about the Orion announcement as can be found here, here and here.

Installing and starting is easy

Download from http://download.eclipse.org/e4/orion/. I choose the version for Mac OSX. It extracts into a folder named eclipse that I renamed immediately to eclipse-orion to avoid confusion with all the other versions installed on my machine.

Setting the server port to other than 8080

Port 8080 is already taken on my system I needed to edit the config.ini file and change the org.eclipse.equinox.http.jetty.http.port variable.
For Mac OSX select eclipse and right mouse click to to show package contents:

Then locate config.ini inside the Contents/MacOS folder.

Then edit to choose the port that is free.

-startup
../../../plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.2.0.v20101119.jar
--launcher.library
../../../plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.cocoa.macosx_1.1.100.v20101004
-consoleLog
-console
-data
serverworkspace
-vmargs
-Dorg.eclipse.equinox.http.jetty.http.port=8888
-Dorg.eclipse.equinox.http.jetty.autostart=false
-XstartOnFirstThread
-Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.carbon.smallFonts

Fire up your iPad (simulator)

Open the iPad simulator, start Safari and go the URL http://ip-address-of-dev-machine:8888/ and see the workspace.

Now you can edit files of your mobile website and save and see them in action right on the couch.

Next time: hooking up to an existing workspace.