BPEL Designer for Apache ODE on Eclipse Helios

Last couple of years there has been very less interest in the BPEL Designer plugin for Eclipse IDE and hence the last it has been tested for is Eclipse Ganymede (3.4.x). Since then two more versions of Eclipse Galileo (3.5.x) and Helios (3.6.x) have been released. Some of the dependencies and packages have evolved with time. This has made it increasingly difficult to use BPEL Designer with the latest version of Eclipse.
Bob Brodt trying to breathe some life back into this project and hopefully build a usable editor and deployment toolset. Have a look at this. I still had to make Apache ODE work with BPEL and use the BPEL Designer plugin. So instead of waiting for M5 release here are some steps I took to make it work. Sadly, I do not have a test machine and I do not know which is the magic step :-( I just did a bunch of things in the same direction.

1. Use Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers Version: 3.6.x Helios release
2. Use Apache ODE 2.0 beta 2 or higher
3. Get BPEL plugin from the update site : http://download.eclipse.org/technology/bpel/update-site/ When I used it in Aug 2010 it was built and tested for Eclipse Ganymede (3.4.x) and was around version 0.4-0.5 stages
1. Click Help –> Install New Software                                                                                                       
2. Add the following update site. Download the latest BPEL plugin, install and restart Eclipse                                                                                                   
3. Checked out all plugins from CVS for BPEL. Many companies block CVS ports. For me both 2401 was blocked while 443 and 80 were monitored for CVS traffic. I had to try this from home                                                       
4. Get all dependencies like
• EMF Compare
• Latest version of JSDT and WST
• Changed file C:\Projects\org.eclipse.bpel\plugins\org.eclipse.bpel.examples.extensionPoints\META-INF\MANIFEST.MF to update dependencies :-
• org.eclipse.wst.jsdt.core;bundle-version="1.1.0",
• org.eclipse.wst.jsdt.ui;bundle-version="1.1.0"
• I also removed a couple of WST dependencies to make it work since my WST was up to date.
5. Install latest Tomcat version 6.0 or later (exe or zip) and drop the latest ODE file (>2.0 beta 2) ode.war into the webapps directory of Apache Tomcat
6. To configure a launch configuration refer to the same manual section 2.2.2 You might have to increase the MaxPermSize in your eclipse settings. My settings in eclipse.ini were
-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.5
-Xms40m
-Xmx512m
--launcher.XXMaxPermSize
512M

7. Set up the Eclipse BPEL Designer with ODE using section 2.3
8. Create a sample project using section 3
9. Finally you can copy the modified bpel/plugins to eclipse/plugins and overwrite the files. This will eliminate the need to deploy an eclipse application to get to the BPEL Designer.

Here are some screenshots. I will