Getting Started

Overview

This guide explains how to setup an Eclipse Dirigible instance and how to use it to build your very first hello-world.js service. The references section below points to the documentation with more technical details for the different aspects of the platform and its components and capabilities.

Setup

In case you are using the shared trial.dirigible.io environment, you can skip this section.

Get the binary

In case you want to use a prebuild package, you can get the one built for your environment from the downloads section.
To build Eclipse Dirigible from sources by yourself, just follow the instructions in the README.

Choose the environment

You can choose one of the setup options available to get an Eclipse Dirigible instance depending on your target environment.
A shared trial instance is also available and can be accessed from here:

trial.dirigible.io

There are many configuration options, so you can connect to different databases, use different platforms, choose a specific set of plugins, and many more.

Access the instance

In case of the standard setup on Apache Tomcat on your local machine, you can point your browser to the location:

http://localhost:8080

Hello World Application

Create a `hello-world.js` service

Once you have a running Eclipse Dirigible instance, you can start with your project:

Choose File → New → Project.
Enter a name and create the project.
Right-click on the project icon in the Workspace view and choose New → Javascript Service.
Enter a name for the service.
Double-click on the file icon to open the file in the editor on the right. The file already contains the hello world.js service implementation.
Right-click on the project icon and choose Publish.
With the file icon selected in the Workspace view, check the result of the execution of our fancy server-side Javascript service in the Preview view.

Update the `hello-world.js` service

Go to line 3 in the editor and change the Hello World! message to Hello Dirigible!.

var response = require("http/v4/response");

response.println("Hello Dirigible!");
response.flush();
response.close();

Save the file: Ctrl+S for Windows, Cmd+S for macOS
The output in the Preview view changes immediately.

Note

This is due to the default configuration of auto-publish on save. You can find more about this dynamic behavior in Dynamic Applications.

References

So far we saw how easy it is to create and modify a RESTful service, but Dirigible capabilities goes way beyond that:

You can explore the samples section for more scenarios.
If you would like to build complex services, you can go to the API section.
If you are curious what you can do with Eclipse Dirigible apart from writing server-side JavaScript services, you can have a look at the features section.
In case you are interested in modeling and generation with the Low-Code/No-Code tooling of Eclipse Dirigible, you can read about entity data models and generation.