Maven Integration for Eclipse WTP 0.14.0, a.k.a m2eclipse-wtp, a.k.a m2e-wtp is out the door. This new release brings its share of new features and enhancements, as well as a bunch of bug fixes. The complete release notes are available here.

m2e-wtp 0.14.0 works with Eclipse Helios and Indigo, requires at least m2e 1.0 and mavenarchiver plugin > 0.14.0 (0.15.0 should be automatically installed). As usual, m2e-wtp can be installed from :

• the Maven Discovery mechanism : Window > Preferences > Maven > Discovery > Open catalog
• the Eclipse Marketplace : Help > Eclipse Marketplace
• the update site : http://download.jboss.org/jbosstools/updates/m2eclipse-wtp/

So what's new and noteworthy in 0.14.0? Let's see :

New support for Application Client projects

Application Client packaging has been introduced with the new maven-acr-plugin. Support for app-client type dependencies has been added in maven-ear-plugin 2.6. Since Application Client projects are natively supported in WTP, we added a new configurator for app-client projects. When an app-client project is imported / configured via m2e, the Application Client Facet will be automatically installed, its version inferred from the contents of META-INF/application-client.xml. Filtering of the deployment descriptor is supported.

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
  <artifactId>maven-acr-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>1.0</version>
  <extensions>true</extensions>
  <configuration>
    <archive>
      <manifest>
        <mainClass>foo.bar.appclient.Main</mainClass>
      </manifest>
    </archive>
    <filterDeploymentDescriptor>true</filterDeploymentDescriptor>
  </configuration>
</plugin>

New support for Web Fragment projects

If a project contains a META-INF/web-fragment.xml in it's compilation output folder, the Web Fragment Facet is automatically installed upon maven project configuration (the Utility Facet is removed if necessary). Note that, as per the Java EE6 spec - and WTP is very picky about it-, Web Fragment projects *must* use Java 1.6. Failure to comply will fail the configuration and an error marker will be displayed.

The use of target/m2e-wtp/web-resources is now optional

Remember, target/m2e-wtp/web-resources/ is used to allow the deployment of automatically generated web resources with WTP.

Please note that this setting will be overridden if web resource filtering is in use, that is if the maven-war-plugin configuration declares <webResources> or sets <filterDeploymentDescriptor> to true. The reason is simple : you don't want to see your source files overwritten by the filtering mechanism (and it would also lead to some not-so-funny build loops).

Custom file name mapping for web project dependencies

Since the maven-war-plugin allows file name customization for librairies and TLDs, based on patterns (http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-war-plugin/examples/file-name-mapping.html), we added the the same feature in m2e-wtp. That will allow you to use a version-less name mapping for dependencies, like :

 <plugin>
  <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
  <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>2.1.1</version>
  <configuration>
    <outputFileNameMapping>@{groupId}@-@{artifactId}@.@{extension}@</outputFileNameMapping>
  </configuration>
</plugin>

The trick here is, in order to support non default filename mappings of dependencies listed in the Maven Library, the artifact is copied to the build directory (the target/ folder by default) under its new name. So if you happen to run a clean build of your project, wiping out that directory, you will need to manually run "Maven > Update Project configuration" on your project.

Option to not publish overlay changes automatically

In order to support publishing of overlay changes automatically, m2e-wtp aggressively cleared the cache of the servers your application is deployed to. However, The overlay feature still being in an experimental state, we decided to be more conservative with regard to server publishing, so a new "Automatically republish servers on overlay modification" preference has been added to Window > Preferences > Server > Overlays.

Overlays support is not bound to Maven, that's why it's under the Server preferences.

Support for the new tag="defaultRootSource" introduced in WTP 3.3.1

When several source folders are declared in the .settings/org.eclipse.wst.common.component file, WTP prior to 3.3.1 (Indigo SR1) tended to generate files (web.xml, faces-config.xml, ...) in the first folder it found. Since web projects define target/m2e-wtp/web-resources as the first source folder (target/m2e-wtp/ear-resources/ for EAR projects), that would cause some issues. In WTP 3.3.1, a new tag has been introduced, designed to indicate which source folder should be used by default, when files need to be looked for / generated. m2e-wtp now adds this tag when WTP 3.3.1 is installed :

<project-modules id="moduleCoreId" project-version="1.5.0">
    <wb-module deploy-name="web-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT">
        <wb-resource deploy-path="/" source-path="/target/m2e-wtp/web-resources"/>
        <wb-resource deploy-path="/" source-path="/src/main/webapp" tag="defaultRootSource"/>
        <wb-resource deploy-path="/WEB-INF/classes" source-path="/src/main/java"/>
         <property name="context-root" value="multi-web"/>
        <property name="java-output-path" value="/multi-web/target/classes"/>
    </wb-module>
</project-modules>

A bit of documentation

As many projects, unfortunately, m2e-wtp doesn't shine in the documentation area. I've been using the github Wiki (https://github.com/sonatype/m2eclipse-wtp/wiki) to start a relatively modest FAQ. I'm planning on adding more content in the near future, but I'm also hoping the community at large will want to contribute some docs of its own. You just need a github account to be able to edit the Wiki.

As always, if you find any issue, please open a bug report at https://issues.sonatype.org/browse/MECLIPSEWTP (and don't forget to attach some test projects).

Happy coding.

Fred.

https://twitter.com/#!/fbricon

It's time for a new fresh milestone update of JBoss Tools:

3.3 M3 (Greased Lightning)

[Download] [Update Site] [What's New] [Forums] [JIRA] [Twitter]

JBoss Tools is a set of plugins for Eclipse that complements, enhances and goes beyond the support that exist for JBoss and related technologies in the default Eclipse distribution. For this release we continue to move Maven, CDI, Java EE support forward and also add in a few new "surprise" features.

Installation

As always, get and install Eclipse 3.7 (Indigo) JEE bundle - with the JEE bundle you majority of the dependencies letting you save bandwidth:

Once you have installed Eclipse, you either find us on Eclipse Marketplace under "JBoss Tools (Indigo)" or use our update site directly.

The updatesite URL to use from Help > Install New Software... is:

http://download.jboss.org/jbosstools/updates/development/indigo/

Maven Profile Selection

In this release we've therefore included an UI which allows you to easily set/change the profiles on single and multiple projects.

This is especially something that becomes useful when you use Arquillian where it is a common practice to use Maven profiles to toggle the various dependency sets for each server you wish to test against.

It works by you selecting the relevant project(s), press Ctrl+Alt+P or use Maven > Select Maven Profiles... and a dialog box appears allowing you to enable/disable the available profiles for the project(s):

Easier Remote Debugging

Ever been tired of having to manually configure ports, projects and source path lookups for debugging on Remote Applications in Eclipse ?

We are, especially after we learned that JVM's running on Hotspot provides API to discover such applications and allow for easy configuration of your debugger. In this release we've thus added a command available from Debug As... > Remote Java Application... in the context menu on any set of resources.

Once you select this command, we use the Hotspot API to discover the remote running applications, allows you to select which you application want to connect to and then we do the tedious work of configuring the ports, names and source code lookups (including maven dependencies if applicable) for your Remote debugging.

No need for manual tweaking anymore.

Thanks to Aslak Knutsen for bringing us the idea and initial code to make this happen!

Running Server Detection

The server adapters now attempt to detect if a server is already running to avoid port conflicts and UI inconcistencies. If a server is detected running you are shown a dialog allowing you to choose to either have the server adapter assume it is already running or force the launch anyway.

CDI & Seam Solder

The CDI tooling adds a bunch of quickfixes to have JBoss Tools fix common issues. To aid in searching and navigating your CDI application, Find References (Ctrl+Shift+G) will now show the full list of injection points and EL usage of your beans and Seam Solder and Config annotations and XML now have easy hyperlink navigation to it's declarations.

@ManagedBean's

The JSF tooling now detects @ManagedBean annotations. This avoids false warnings/errors when importing JSF 2 examples. Do consider using @Named instead for better integration into the JavaEE stack.

SAR Projects

For a long time we have been asked about providing support for SAR style projects for use on older versions of JBoss AS. This style of project packaging is now supported both in pure WTP style projects and via Maven.

GWT Tools are back

Since last time, Google released their GWT eclipse plugin in a version that supports Eclipse 3.7 allowing us to reenable the GWT Tools.

And more...

There are additional bugfixes and more features to browse over at What's New & Noteworthy

Like the new features ? Leave a comment to let us know!

And by all means,

Have fun!