Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Adding HSQLDB Plugin to Eclipse

i wanted to play a little bit with HSQLDB and i thought it might be a good idea to add HSQLDB Plugin to my eclipse so that i can use it more seamlessly while i try out stuff in my java code from eclipse.The main advantage is that the footprint of the DB is so small and no complex installation is there.It doesn't consume much resources & is good enough while experimenting things in a dev box.
I thought of keeping some quick pointers here.

1.Download HSQLDB from sourceforge http://sourceforge.net/projects/hsqldb/
2.Download HSQLDBPlugin from sourceforge http://sourceforge.net/projects/hsqldb-plugin/files/
3.Unzip the HSQLDBPlugin zip,you will get two folders hsqldb.core and hsqldb.ui
4.Copy both the folders into ECLIPSE_HOME/plugins folder
5.Navigate to ECLIPSE_HOME/plugins/hsqldb.ui folder from command prompt/shell
6.run the command jar cvf ui.jar -C bin . (note the ending dot,denotes the current folder).This command will generate ui.jar
7.restart eclipse

Once we follow these steps,we will see a new link named "Add Database Engine Nature" appear in the right click menu of the eclipse project

Clicking on this menu will then show up various options for starting/stopping/starting database manager etc