IBM Rational Application Developer (RAD) is an Eclipse-based IDE. I love using Eclipse and its derivatives. I recently got a new laptop, installed RAD 7.5 (I had been using RAD 7.0), and wanted to connect to our team’s svn repository. But RAD doesn’t have a native svn client. But not to worry, it’s Eclipse-based, we can get something working.

I settled on Subclipse, as it is relatively easy to get working. It would be nice if an svn client was natively included, but we can work around that.

First, versioning. From what I can tell by looking at the plugin version numbers, it appears that RAD 7.5 is based on Eclipse 3.4 which maps to the Eclipse version name Ganymede. So when you are looking at the subclipse web site, get the version of subclipse that can work in the Ganymede (3.4) version of Eclipse.

First, start up RAD and go to the menu “Help” -> “Software Updates” and click on the “Available Software” tab. Then click on the “Manage Sites” button. If you scroll towards the bottom of the list, you should see one titled “http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.2.x”. As of this writing, subclipse has version 1.6, which is what I use, check the subclipse site for more info. There isn’t a way to edit the 1.2 software site URL to make it a later version, so you’ll need to click “Add” to make a new one. Use the URL for the update site for the latest version of subclipse that runs on Eclipse 3.4, which as of this writing is “http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.6.x”. After you’ve added this URL to the list, check the box on its left, then click OK to get back to the “Available Software” dialog.

Now click on the plus sign next to the subclipse 1.6 entry and after a moment of “Pending” it should show you some entries. I got 3 and selected all 3 checkboxes. Then I clicked the “Install” button on the top right corner of the dialog. The screen capture below shows the plugins that those 3 selections installed. Give it a few minutes to install and restart.

List of plugins installed

Our svn server has only an ssh interface, so I have to use a repository URL in the form of “svn+ssh://”.

Martin Woodward provided some good help. What got me working the rest of the way was the following: go to the menu “Window” -> “Preferences” -> “Team” -> “SVN” and set the SVN interface client to “SVNKit (Pure Java)”. I didn’t need to install TortoiseSVN and set the environment variable for tortoisePlink as Martin describes, but TortoiseSVN is good to have around anyway.

Now go to the menu “File” -> “New” -> “Other” -> “SVN” -> “Checkout Projects from SVN” and enter your repository URL (mine is in the “svn+ssh://” format). If you don’t want to set up ssh keys, you will be prompted for your ssh password and that can be saved in RAD so you don’t need to enter it each time. And compared to the setup on my old laptop, I didn’t get a popup MS-DOS window for each svn transaction.

I originally had been using JavaHL instead of SVNKit as the interface client, and had been getting errors such as “Folder ” does not exist” and “can’t create tunnel”, which went away when I started using SVNKit. Perhaps if I used tortoisePlink with JavaHL it would work, but I didn’t try that. As always, it’s a community of us that helps us work through all of it.

Here is the IBM statement on software supported with RAD. Scroll down to the bottom to “Source Configuration Management”.