error deploying laszlo app

This morning I fired up the eclipse IDE and tried to deploy my Laszlo application as usual: right-click on the file in the Navigator View and choose "Run as... Laszlo Application". After a few moments, I got an uninformative error message in a small window - "Error Deploying Laszlo App" - and the application failed to launch.

After much hunting, I found that there is a .log file in the .metadata subdirectory of my project workspace directory. This .log file had a more informative stack trace for the error: "org.eclipse.core.internal.resources.ResourceException: Resource is out of sync with the file system: /Laszlo_Project/C__Program Files_OpenLaszlo Server 3.1.1_Server_lps-3.1.1_lps_components/base/baseslider.lzx."

Aha! I had edited baseslider.lzx using Notepad to add debug code yesterday to it yesterday. Later I had removed the debug code so the file was actually pristine except for the "last modified" date. Even so, Eclipse apparently cannot handle such an affront; it will smack you if you edit source outside the IDE.

So again, I had to go to the Navigator View, and under Laszlo_Project I found the directory "C__Program Files_OpenLaszlo Server 3.1.1_Server_lps-3.1.1_lps_components" (which I believe is an imported resource). I opened that out, opened the "base" folder inside that, and found baseslider.lzx. I right-clicked on that file and hit the "Refresh" menu item.

This fixed the problem; now the application deploys fine. Yay!

I am less than thrilled with Eclipse as an IDE for OpenLaszlo...