[Remoterengine-devel] Running RemoteREngine from Eclipse

[Ian Long]

I have managed to get the REngine Server and the Test Client running 
within debuggers in Eclipse today.. As part of this I have checked in 
some changes to the build.xml to update some of the dependencies and 
updated the .bat scripts within the bin directory to start the server & 
client from Windows. Currently the scripts have a hardcoded path for the 
java.rmi.server.codebase property as I haven't managed to find a way to 
get Dos to generate a URL with /s instead of \s.

I still have a couple of items that I don't fully understand:
1.) I can't run the Ant build script from within eclipse without 
compilation errors - even though my Eclipse is set to use my external 
Ant installation and I can compile without any issues outside of Eclipse.
2.) Eclipse doesn't seem to like the package directory structure we are 
using and continually complains that .java files aren't in the 
appropriate directory even though they are. Doing Project -> Clean 
resolves the issue temporarily.

I have also started playing around with policy files, so hopefully will 
be checking in a tighter policy file in the not too distant future.

I will shortly be making some further changes to allow us to control 
which port the RMI Server listens on with a view to starting to run the 
server on my Win 2008 Server rather than my dev laptop.

Properties that need to be set to start the server directly from Java are:
-cp Path to the local jar files or .class files - any path entries that 
point to .class files need to contain a trailing \ (or / on Unix)
-Djara.rmi.server.codebase - Needs to be a URL containing the classpath 
to the jar files or Java class files. This can be either http://..... if 
the classes are available via a web server or a file URL such as 
file:/d:/remoterenegine/build/ if on the local Windows or Unix file system
-Djava.sercurity.policy - Path to the security file
-Drjava.path -  Path to the java directory within rJava, e.g. 
%R_HOME%\library\rJava\java
-Drjava.class.path - Path to the classes within rJava, e.g 
R_HOME%\library\rJava\java\boot;R_HOME%\library\rJava\java
-Djava.library.path - Path to the directory containing jri.dll

Cheers,
Ian.