JBoss Tools 4.0.0 Alpha 2

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

Time for Alpha2 for JBoss Tools 4 - the set of eclipse plugins that works and run on Eclipse Juno and looking at Eclipse Marketplace stats it already is being more installed than our Indigo stable release. Amazing

Installation

Recommended path to install is to have a clean Eclipse Juno install and use our updatesite to install from.

This release you need Eclipse 4.2 but we recommend using the Eclipse 4.2 JEE Bundle since then you get most of the dependencies preinstalled.

Once you have installed Eclipse use our update site directly, or you can drag this icon into your running Eclipse to install from the Eclipse Marketplace:

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

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

Note: SOA Tooling, including BPEL, Drools, ESB, jBPM3, jBPM5, Savara, SwitchYard, pi4soa, ModeShape & Teiid Designer are not included in the JBoss Tools Core release at this time - they will be available separately.

Note m2e-wtp users: In case you already have m2e-wtp installed, then add the updatesite first and then run "Help > Find Updates" before trying to run Help > Install new. This way you will automatically update from the old org.maven.ide.eclipse.wtp.feature 0.15 to the new namespace & version, org.eclipse.m2e.wtp.feature 0.16.

Stacks attack!

One of the challenges tools and users have is that as the various runtimes evolves and new features gets added. How do we keep up ? How do we ensure that you got the right examples and get easily started on using the new or even old runtime ? Which version of the runtimes is the recommend one ? Which version of the archetypes is supposed to be used with these runtimes to show its features ?

And especially for tools - how do we avoid having a JBoss Tools installation go stale without requiring a new release for every runtime released ?

To solve this, we worked together with the JBoss Developer Framework team and developed JBoss Stacks. JDF team launched the site allowing you to navigate the various BOM's and recommended versions. Now, in JBoss Tools Alpha2 we have the JBoss Central wizards choose the appropriate version of the archetypes based on which runtime version you have installed.

In case you do not have a runtime installed the recommended version will be chosen and you can download the matching runtime directly from the JBoss Central wizards.

These runtime downloads are also now available when creating a server adapter directly allowing you to either download directly or get a link for the latest version of JBoss runtimes.

OpenShift SSH Key management

The biggest hurdle users seemed to have when trying out OpenShift was to get their SSH keys to match up. Before you had to use the OpenShift web-ui to manage these keys, in Alpha2 we've made this feature available directly from within the tools.

You find this feature by right clicking on your OpenShift connection and choosing "Manage SSH Keys".

And from here you can now add/remove SSH keys to OpenShift.

Forge Debugging

If you are a plugin developer for Forge then you can now debug the Forge console launched within the Forge Tools - allowing for easy inspection and debugging of your Forge Plugins.

This feature was contributed by Thomas Frübeck during our 3.3.0 final lock down so it could not make it in early, it was there in Alpha1 but we forgot to mention it then.

Thanks Thomas!

Hibernate Tools Core on Maven

Koen Aers been working on the Forge integration of Hibernate tools and in that respect needed updated versions of Hibernate Tools core to be available in Maven.

Thus the latest Hibernate Tools Core CR releases are now available in JBoss repository at https://repository.jboss.org/nexus/content/groups/public/org/hibernate/hibernate-tools/

What else ?

Jira has the full details but if you are into screenshots see the Whats New section.

Next up is our Beta 1 for JBoss Tools 4 - please don't hesitate to give your feedback on Alpha2

Have fun,

We released back in July a new version of JBoss Tools 3.3.1 and JBoss Developer Studio 5.0.1 which fixes the problem of installing on Eclipse 3.7.0 (Indigo) and makes it possible, but not recommended to install on Eclipse 4.x (Juno).

The SOA Tools are also now available from JBoss Central and we got news from the Fedora Java spin which includes parts of JBoss Tools. More below...

SOA Tools

The SOA Tools (jbpm, drools, modeshape, teiid, etc.) are available from JBoss Central in both JBoss Tools 3.3+ and Developer Studio 5+.

To get them open JBoss Central and go to the Software/Update tab and they should be listed, ready to be installed.

The plugins have been updated to work with the latest release of JBoss SOA Platform and its components.

Eclipse 3.7.0 - you still use that ?

JBoss Tools 3.3.0 came out requiring Eclipse 3.7.1 because there was some rather nasty bugs we wanted to avoid to expose to users and we naively belived most would be on 3.7.1+ by now - but oh boy we were wrong.

It turns out that when we released the final version of JBoss Tools 3.3.0 our success install rate went up significantly (Yay!) but we also saw a skyrocketing level of errored installs (Not good). Looking at those error logs showed us that majority of Eclipse 3.7 (Indigo) users are still on the very first version, i.e. 3.7.0.

In a perfect world Eclipse P2 update mechanisim would let you update to Eclipse 3.7.1+ at the same time as installing plugins that requires/suggest to use a bugfixed version, but unfortunately Eclipse mechanism does not allow for this.

Therefore in this update we allowed JBoss Tools to depend on Eclipse 3.7.0 to make it installable, but Eclipse 3.7.0 users will now get a warning dialog on startup suggesting they should update their Eclipse to have a better experience.

How about Eclipse 4.x/Juno ?

JBoss Tools 3.3.x and Developer Studio is tested and supported on Eclipse 3.7/Indigo - but what if I want to use Juno ?

There are two options:

A) You can *try* use JBoss Tools 3.3.x on Juno - but we do not recommend this.

B) You can use the JBoss Tools 3.4.x nightly builds updatesite - this have been updated/adjusted to work with Juno and is the basis for the next major update of tools and Developer Studio.

In both cases your mileage will vary, but if you are up for it please do try out the nightly builds and report any issues found while using Juno with JBoss Tools.

Fedora Java Spin

Gerard Ryan have been doing his Google Summer of Code project about creating a Fedora Spin that would be good for Java developers. In that progress he took on the task on trying to package JBoss Tools, or at least parts of it so it could be installed "the Fedora way".

He actually succeded in making this happen and you can see his final report about this at his GSOC blog.

You can try out the full Fedora Java spin by downloading the ISO images from Gerard or if you are already running Fedora 17 or newer, you can try it out by running:

yum install eclipse-jbosstools

This will actually be installed into Fedora's version of Eclipse Juno, so that is third way to try Juno out with parts of JBoss Tools.

Hope you like that and if you find issues report it in our jra, but please mention if you are using the Fedora package since there are some slight differences.

Have fun,

Max

I'm extremely proud to be able to announce that both JBoss Tools 3.3 and Developer Studio 5.0 final releases are now available.

Final GA

Developer Studio: [Download] | Tools: [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 exists for JBoss and related technologies in the default Eclipse distribution.

JBoss Developer Studio is a fully bundled Eclipse distribution which not only includes the majority of JBoss Tools but also all its needed dependencies and 3rd party plugins allowing for an easy one-click and no-fuss installation.

If you are into doing your own bleeding edge eclipse plugin assembly, JBoss Tools is for you; if you are more into having something that "Just Works" then JBoss Developer Studio is the way to go.

Installation

JBoss Developer Studio comes with everything pre-bundled in its installer. Simply download it and run it like this:

java -jar jbdevstudio-<installername>.jar

Note: if you are on Windows or Mac OSX 64-bit we recommend you ensure to select the 32-bit option in the multi-platform installer to get Visual Page editor working and use much less memory.

JBoss Tools requires a bit more:

This release requires at least Eclipse 3.7.2 but we recommend using the Eclipse 3.7.2 JEE Bundle since then you get most of the dependencies preinstalled.

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

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

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

Please note that the URL above is for the stable releases, if you use the development update site (http://download.jboss.org/jbosstools/updates/development/indigo/) that will work too. Only difference is that the development site will contain beta/CR releases too.

Note: SOA tooling for BPEL, Drools, Guvnor, jBPM, ESB, Modeshape, pi4soa, Savara, SwitchYard & Teiid are no longer included in the JBoss Tools release. They will become available separately later.

A Year of Features

The amount of features and new improvements in this final is awesome - here is a little overview:

Slim & Fast Universal Installer

The installer for JBoss Developer Studio is now a multiplatform installer. Allows you to just download one installer no matter what OS you are running. And the installer is smaller and faster to download and run than previous versions.

JBoss Central

We wanted to make it easy for new users to get started with JBoss technology and for existing users have a place to get more information and keep uptodate on what is happening in the JBoss Community. That place is called JBoss Central.

Central shows up at startup (you can disable it if you want) but is also available with a quick click in the toolbar. Besides having blogs, news and documentation links it also serves as a way to start one of the six project wizards

which help you get started with JBoss technology such as CDI, Richfaces, Errai/GWT, Spring on AS etc.

Central also has a second tab called "Software/Update" where you can easily install tested and verified plugins to work with JBoss Tools and within Developer Studio.

New Server Adapters

We've extended our support for JBoss servers to include JBoss Enterprise Platform 6, JBoss AS 7.

We continue to also work with the previous versions of application servers making it possible to develop, run and debug both new and older applications.

There is also an OpenShift server adapter to integrate with Red Hat OpenShift PaaS, more on that later.

We also continue to have the Deploy Only server which allows you to use our incremental and flexible server adapter features together with any server that supports hot deployment.

Furthermore all of these server adapters support remote deployment via any filesystem protocols supported by Eclipse Remote System deployment such as SSH or FTP.

One of the new features in this area is that servers now no longer need to be started by the tools, if a server is already detected as running or you have enable "Server is externally managed" then

JBoss Tools server adapters will just connect to it and do its deployments as configured - allowing you to work with the tools in  many different environments.

Maven

One of the big new additions is the full support and integration of m2e for users of Maven projects. We did not just include m2e, we went ahead and improved on it and added better support for the frameworks and features of Maven we found to be useful.

We have a lot of Maven improvements.

• Maven Profile Selection - dialog to quickly enable/disable profiles on your Maven projects ( especially useful to switch between Arquillian server profiles )
• Endorsed Libraries Classpath Container - if your Maven project uses endorsed libraries we setup a matching classpath that gets priority over the JDK classpath.
• Tons of framework configurators - we enable the matching tooling in eclipse if your Maven project uses one of the following frameworks:
  • Hibernate/JPA
  • JSF
  • CDI
  • JAX-RS
  • Seam
  • Portlets.
• Configure repositories in settings.xml - "Configure Maven Repositories" allows you to easily add and remove repositories from your Maven settings.xml; available as a quickfix on missing dependencies error markers.
• Materialize Library - Allows you to copy all the jars found in a Maven classpath container into a directory. Great if you have a Maven example but would rather use it with pure Eclipse or some other build system.
• Automatic Source Lookup for Server runtimes based on Maven metadata - point Source lookup to your server directory with jars and it will locate the matching source based on maven metadata; can be enable to be automatically done for JBoss runtimes.

And then of course m2e-wtp, the feature that configures Eclipse Web Tools based of your pom.xml had a lot of features improved and added. The m2e-wtp also is moving to eclipse.org to be part of future Eclipse release trains.

Furthermore we've released m2e configurators to m2e marketplace to improve configuration of Annotation Processing, wro4j - javascript optimization and finally supporting projects that configure eclipse JDT as their compiler.

All in all, if you want to use Maven with Eclipse, JBoss Tools makes your life easier!

OpenShift

OpenShift also came around during the last year. OpenShift is a PaaS with a free offering that includes support for running applications written in Java, Ruby, Node.js, Python, PHP, Perl and more.

The great thing about OpenShift is that you can easily get up and running with just a webbrowser, git and SSH while using command line tools - very simple and powerful.

We wanted to bring this simplicity and power to the users of Eclipse and that is what our OpenShift Tooling does.

When you have an account at OpenShift you can easily browse, create and manipulate your OpenShift applications and cartridges. OpenShift supports PHP, Perl, Python, Node.js, Java and if that is not enough you can use the Do-It-Yourself cartridge. You can easily open a webbrowser showing your application, monitor remote log files, inspect environment setup and start Port Forwarding allowing for remote debugging and remote browsing of databases and Jenkins instances.

The OpenShift tools is all compatible with the command line tooling but also completely independent of it allowing you to start with the tools that fit your needs first and then mix and match as you see fit.

For the release we've create a "Getting started with OpenShift" video:

Forge

If you like Forge you will like JBoss Tools for its Forge Console which let you to use Forge in context of Eclipse and have them coexist and interact. The console will open and show the files/projects you edit/create in Forge and the console can also let Forge track the selection you have in Eclipse.

Browser Simulator

BrowserSim can be started with one-click from the IDE, showing instantly the selected file or URL in a mobile browser simulator. The simulator has skins and layout dimensions for a range of pouplar mobile and tablet devices. You can rotate the device to see how your application looks and how it is reacting to such size and layout changes.

Hibernate

Hibernate Tools now supports multiple versions of Hibernate - you can now use it together with Hibernate 3.3-3.5, 3.6 and 4.0/4.1.

JAX-RS

If your application uses JAX-RS annotations there is now a node in the project explorer that allows you to easily navigate to your various Rest endpoints. The JAX-RS tooling will also validate your annotations (mismatched names etc.) and provides code completion.

The JAX-RS integration allow to easily "run" your endpoints by making sure the server is running and then opening the URL in the Webservice Tester for further investigation/testing.

And More...

Seam 2.3.x support, CDI tooling have great improvements, incl. support for DeltaSpike, the visual page editor is faster than ever, bugfixes, overall awesomeness and the list goes on.

You can see the full list of new and noteworthy on the New and Noteworthy page

Does it Juno ?

Since the first version of Eclipse Juno is arriving soon it is worth mentioning that JBoss Tools from its updatesite can be installed on top of Juno.

It is though not guaranteed everything works, we know that especially Hibernate Dali/JPT integration have issues since here the API has changed greatly.

But if you are a Juno early-adopter then do please try run JBoss Tools on it and if you find issues let us know in the forum or on JIRA.

Then we will use the input for the next revision of JBoss Tools which will start shortly.

Hope you like it, and remember:

Have fun,

Max

Beta3 of JBoss Tools and Developer Studio is now available with a good set of bugfixes but also a good set of new improvements and features in the area of OpenShift, Maven, BrowerSim, GWT, Annotation Processing and it even now come with easy installable source features for easy debugging and hacking. 

Beta3

Developer Studio: [Download] | Tools: [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.

JBoss Developer Studio is a fully bundled Eclipse distribution which not only includes majority of JBoss Tools but also all its needed dependencies and 3rd party plugins allowing for an easy one-click and no-fuzz installation.

If you are into doing your own bleeding edge eclipse plugin assembly, JBoss tools is for you, if you are more into having something that "Just Works" then JBoss Developer Studio is the way to go.

Installation

JBoss Developer Studio comes with everything pre-bundled in its installer. Simply download it and run it like this:

java -jar jbdevstudio-<installername>.jar

Note, if you are on Mac OSX 64-bit we recommend you ensure to select the 32-bit option in the multi-platform installer to get Visual Page editor working and use much less memory.

Similar if you are on Windows 64-bit then use a 32-bit JDK to get 32-bit version running.

JBoss Tools requires a bit more:

This release requires at least Eclipse 3.7.1 but we recommend using the Eclipse 3.7.2 JEE Bundle since then you get most of the dependencies preinstalled.

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

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

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

Note: SOA tooling such as Drools, jbpm, ESB, Teeid etc. are not included in the JBoss Tools core releases at this time - they will be available separately.

OpenShift

The OpenShift platform is moving and improving all the time and this also shows in the OpenShift tooling included in JBoss Tools.

The most prominent and waited for feature in this release is we now support starting port forwarding from the IDE instead of using the command line.

And we've done it so it is even better and more powerful than the command line in a couple of situations:

• it works on all platforms out of the box
• it allows you to choose between using 127.0.0.1 or the remote addresses (especially good for Mac and Windows which needs configuration using 127.0.0.x)
• it will find free ports if necessary avoiding you to have to stop your local running servers to connect to OpenShift

To start/stop this you use the context menu of your OpenShift application in OpenShift Explorer (previously named OpenShift Console).

OpenShift Tools further more now allows you to put any existing application onto OpenShift where it previously only allowed Eclipse WTP projects. These projects can now even be multi-module Maven projects if you want to. This feature should be used with care since it overwrites your OpenShift application and your project content might not be working out of the box on OpenShift - thus use with care and if it fails

remember that OpenShift uses Git for it storage so you can roll it back in case of a failure.

And finally OpenShift tools also allows you to create scalable applications in the UI now.

Annotation Processing w/Maven

Java EE 6 really started pushing more and more annotation processors and Eclipse APT provides a nice incremental integreation with this in Eclipse that makes it fast and non-invasive.

Unfortunately in context of Maven this have not always been easy to get configured since there exists multiple ways to invoke the Annotation Processor and in some cases Eclipse APT single-folder-output gives problems

With this release of JBoss Tools we are also releasing a configurator for m2e which combines all the best plugins concerning Annotation Processing and made something better and more integrated.

Fred Bricon have written a full blog about the feature set and how it works - if you use Annotation processing and maven I recommend you read it.

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) w/Maven

In our previous releases we have struggled with getting GWT examples to load into Eclipse without users having to tweak and manually run certain actions in specific sequence. The reason for this all came down to that there did not exist a m2e Configurator which takes the maven compiler plugin settings and apply them to Google's Eclipse plugin properly. With JBoss Tools Beta 3 that now exists and it just works.

Without this loaded you would have to manually add the GWT module xml to Eclipse and then perform a build based on that which would generate to possibly different output directories than your Maven project is configured to. With JBoss Tools for Maven loaded this a problem of the past.

Mobile Browser Simulator Skins

BrowserSim now has support for View Source, roatation of the screen by clicking in the corners and two new skins:

...and finally as a team enjoying the wonders of Open Source we've added two things that could not exist without the source(s) being open:

JBoss Source Lookup

We've included the JBoss Source Lookup container which Snjezana have been working on that will scan a directory of jar's and use their Maven metadata and if necessary their MD5 checksum to locate the source code for any Launch configuration not just your Maven projects and Maven classpath provider.

This is useful when you have a server like JBoss, Tomcat, Glassfish or any other server or framework which jar's are mostly available in Maven repositories together with their source artifacts.

This allow you to fully debug your runtimes without having to pollute your classpath or Eclipse project configuration with runtime details, machine specific locations and manual download of the sources.

The feature must be explicitly enabled, thus be sure to read Snjezana's wiki article outlining how to use this.

Eclipse Source Features

If you are into Eclipse plugin development and want to tinker with the source of JBoss Tools our updatesite now include a matching source feature for majority of our plugins under the Source category on the updatesite. This allows debugging and editing of JBoss Tools plugin without having to checkout our full SVN source tree. Contributions very welcome

...and more

As usual screenshots and more explanation of what is new is available from the What's New site!

Let us know what you think - and do know that we are codefreezing for CR1/GA any day now, so do let us know if you find big issues or simply just love it - both things is what keeps us going

Have fun,

Max

Beta2

Earlier this week we pushed a bugfix release out called Beta2 for both JBoss Tools 3.3 and JBoss Developer Studio 5.0.

If you already have JBoss Tools 3.3.x installed you should get this update as soon as you use Help > Check for updates.

For Developer Studio you will need to either redownload or manually add the staging updatesite as described on https://devstudio.jboss.com/updates/5.0/staging/

The bugfixes mainly relates to better handling of errors in OpenShift tooling and updates to Forge runtime making the CRUD generation work better.

You can see the full change list here

Movies

Burr Sutter have been busy and cranked out a whole series of videos showing of JBoss Tools and Developer Studio.

The topics cover how to install JBoss Tools and Developer Studio, Java EE 6 + Arquillian , Richfaces 4 Desktop w/Mobile, Forge, Google Web Toolkit, Maven, Hibernate Tools Reverse Engineering and Forge Reverse Engineering.

Burr walks you through how to use these various technologies from beginning to end all rooted in JBoss Central - a great way to get started with JBoss Middleware and learn about how to use JBoss Tools to make it even easier.

You can see them all on our newly fresh updated Movie page with either Flash or HTML5.

If you like the videos please login to vimeo and Like them or even better leave a comment on what you think or what other video content you would like to see.

m2e-wtp at Eclipse

I wrote about how we have proposed moving m2e-wtp to Eclipse.org. This should make life easier for Mave and Eclipse users overall and I'm happy to report we have received nothing but encouragements and good feedback on that proposal.

We will keep you posted on how things move along with the proposal and hope you will give it a try as soon as we have something posted and built.

Thank you for the support and Have fun watching the videos and trying out Beta2!

Been a busy week and weekend preparing and arriving at EclipseCon which this year decided to move from sunny(?) California to rainy(?) Reston in Virginia.

EclipseCon is always a busy week for me, and this year is no different - below is a list of the “official” items I’ll be doing:

Tycho, still good, bad or ugly ?, Tuesday - a refreshed version of my talk from EclipseCon Europe talking about how many good, bad and ugly things we ’ve see in Tycho in the process of JBoss Tools moving to it from “good old, but crappy, PDE build”

Eclipse Product Showcase, Wednesday - I’ve submitted a new product showcase to the reception happening at EclipseCon. We’ll see if I make it in on time

Ceylon the language and it’s tools, Thursday - I’ll give an introduction to the Ceylon language and the Eclipse tooling built to support it.

Booth Bunny, most days - I’ll be hanging out in Red Hat’s booth this year together with Dan Allen from JBoss and a bunch of OpenShift guys; showing of the wonders of cloud and middleware tooling.

…and one more thing - but that is going to be a seperate blog - watch this space

Rest of Red Hat

The above is not all from us, we got a few others showing up at EclipseCon too:

Get ready to fight your technical debt, with Tycho, Sonar and Jacoco where Mickael Istria and his co-speaker from Pod Programming, Xavier Seignard will be showing how continous improvement can be made possible with the means of technologies such as Sonar, Tycho and Jacoco.

Persona Non Grata - Don’t forget the users when doing your designs! is where Brian Fitzpatrick will talk about how to use user personas as guide lines for development.

Integration and Functional Testing from the IDE: Where does it hurt ? a BOF hosted by Dan Allen on how Arquillian can be used for integration and functional testing and what challenges still lies ahead to make that work smooth from wtihin Eclipse.

Hands on with C/C++ IDE which is a tutorial hosted by Andre Overholt which guides you through how to get to use Eclipse developing C/C++ applications.

Jumpstart Java EE6 Development in the Cloud with JBoss Tools where Mark Atwood is bound to show off JBoss Tools and how it works with the JEE tooling and OpenShift PAAS from Red Hat.

Developing Cloud Apps with Orion, Django and MongoDB - in 30 Minutes or Less is Mark now talking about how to use Eclipse Orion with OpenShift to do Django and MongoDB development.

Mobilize Your MongoDB! Developing iPhone and Android Apps for the Cloud with Eclipse shows Grant Shipley going all mobile in showing how to do mobile apps development with OpenShift and Eclipse.

…and then there is all the BOF’s and bar’s where all the real work is done - looking forward to meet old and new friends.

See you there and Have fun!

This is the last of a series of blog posts covering three features I have had a personal interest in making it into AS 7.1 and the upcoming JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) 6.

Todays topic is about Quickstarts.

Quickstart Frenzy

The team doing AS Quickstarts have worked with the tools team on making sure all of the quickstarts have been developed, tested and verified to work nice and clean out of the box for developers - including making them equally Just Work no matter if you are using command line or when using them with an IDE such as JBoss Tools and Developer Studio.

This was even true with AS 7.0 and if you missed our recent AeroGear launch you should go look since this Mobile/HTML5 driven project used the tools to show of AeroGear’s magic and one of the key drivers on making this so nice and clean was with the help of the Maven based quickstarts and the power of AS 7, OpenShift and well - kick ass tools if you ask me

You will be seeing more of these things happening going forward when other projects gets upto speed with AS 7 and start to have a full experience on AS 7 together with Quickstarts that works well with tools.

Now back to the AS 7.1 quickstarts. The following is a listing of the curent quickstarts available for download at jboss.org

• bean-validation - Bean Validation, JPA
• bmt - EJB, Programmatically control transactions
• cdi-injection - CDI injections & qualifiers + Servlet
• cmt - EJB, how to use container managed transactions
• ejb-in-ear - EJB + JSF, JAR and WAR deployed as EAR
• ejb-in-war - EJB + JSF deployed as a war
• ejb-remote - shows how to access EJBs remotely (EJB + JNDI)
• forge-from-scratch - Forge
• greeter - CDI + JSF + JPA + EJB + JTA
• h2-console - H2 Database console
• helloworld -Very basic CDI + Servlet
• helloworld-gwt - GWT
• helloworld-html5 - Very basic HTML5
• helloworld-jms - JMS
• helloworld-jsf - Very basic CDI + JSF
• helloworld-mdb - Very basic JMS and MDBs
• helloworld-osgi - OSGi
• helloworld-rs - CDI + JAX-RS
• helloworld-singleton - Singleton Session Bean
• hibernate3 - Hibernate 3
• hibernate4 - Hibernate 4
• jts - Using JTS to coordinate distributed transactions
• kitchensink - CDI + JSF + JPA + EJB + JPA + JAX-RS + BV
• kitchensink-ear - kitchensink as an EAR archive
• kitchensink-html5-mobile - kitchensink using HTML5, suitable for mobile and tablet computers
• kitchensink-jsp - kitchensink converted to use JSP
• log4j - JBoss Modules, Class loading, logging
• numberguess - CDI + JSF
• payment-cdi-event - CDI
• servlet-async - CDI + Asynchronous Servlet + Asynchronous EJB
• servlet-filterlistener - Servlet Filter and Listener
• wsat-simple - Simple WS-AT JAX-WS Web service
• wsba-coordinator-completion-simple - Simple WS-BA JAX-WS Web service with coordinator driven completion
• wsba-participant-completion-simple - Simple WS-BA JAX-WS Web service with participant driven completion

As you might notice the number of quickstarts have grown from 5 in AS 7.0 to 33 in AS 7.1.

These quickstarts cover a broad range of technologies all setup to run on AS 7.1 and all follows more or less the same structure:

• contains a README.html/.md with explanation of what the example does
• a pom.xml following good best practices when building projects that uses JEE & JBoss API
• is importable into JBoss Tools and Developer Studio

Mind you that because of the last two points (pom.xml + importable into tools) you should see that it is just as usable in other IDE’s that support import of Maven projects such as Netbeans, Intellij and others.

That is the power of Maven - no matter how much we all love to complain about Maven’s shortcomings as a build tool, the fact it is prevalant, has all major dependencies available and works from both command line and IDE’s is a huge win.

Migrating from Community and Product

JBoss AS 7 and EAP 6 is the first release of JBoss which are built primarily with Maven. This change also makes it possible to finally easily use proper dependency managemment when building applications using JBoss AS 7 and EAP.

We’ve even gone so far to make sure that it is easier to move from AS 7 to EAP 6 - for plain applications it should just be a matter to adjust the Bill-Of-Materials (BOM) POM used in your <dependencyManagement> section in your pom.xml.

To do this presented a challenge since EAP 6 as the productized rebuilt version of AS 7 would get an overlap of Maven Group/Artifact/Version-identifiers (GAV) if not done properly. If you’ve used build systems with dependency management you know overlapping Maven GAV's presents a problem of possibly ambigious dependencies when doing builds. Especially with Maven which caches and stores all its artifacts in one location, namely ~/.m2/repository. Imagine what happens if you first built against Maven central/JBoss.org repositories and then later used an EAP Maven repository where GAV were the same but the actual artifacts behind them were not. Such setup will be catastrophic for any software release, no matter if mission critical or just for fun.

Therefore we have taken this into account and JBoss EAP build team ensures that no GAV “overlapping” occurs by adding the -redhat-<number> qualifier to anything that is part of an EAP based product such as JBoss EAP 6.

This ensures continuity for developers using AS 7 and wanting to test and go to production against EAP 6 and doing this change is illustrated well when looking at the difference between quickstarts in JBoss AS 7 and those bundled with EAP 6.

Here is a snippet from the dependency management part of AS 7.1 quickstart:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.jboss.spec</groupId>
    <artifactId>jboss-javaee-6.0</artifactId>
    <version>3.0.0.Beta1</version>
    <type>pom</type>
    <scope>import</scope>
</dependency>

And here is the same from an EAP 6 quickstart:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.jboss.spec</groupId>
    <artifactId>jboss-javaee-6.0</artifactId>
    <version>3.0.0.Beta1-redhat-1</version>
    <type>pom</type>
    <scope>import</scope>
</dependency>

Notice, the difference ? The only difference is ‘-redhat–1’ in the version tag.

This small change ensures that your build now will use EAP 6 supported productized binaries instead of the community bits as long as you do not list the explicit version of your specific dependencies and let the BOM POM be the "manager" of the versions.

It is a subtle difference with great potential.

This means that users applications can be built targeting community releases early on and when relevant start targeting productized versions with an easy change of the BOM.

And as a sideeffect it also becomes easy for you to try out experimental new features in future community releases of JBoss AS 7, 8, etc. by just picking the right version in the dependency management section.

Note: as productized versions stabilizes, gets security and bug fixes some differences will occur which might require some other changes but with the conventions of the -redhat qualifier and usage of so called Maven Bill-Of-Material(BOM)-pom’s it becomes easy migrate and there is a central place and format to outline the build differences that applies to you as a user of JBoss AS and EAP.

JBoss Tools and Quickstarts

There are two easy ways to get started with quickstarts from within JBoss Tools.

The first one is simply to open JBoss Central and pick one of the Quickstarts listed in the project example section:

When starting such example you get a short description plus option to download any missing plugins or server runtimes (such as AS 7.1).

Note: at time of writing the current M5 release of JBoss Tools targets AS 7.0, AS 7.1 will be targeted in upcoming JBoss Tools release.

This makes it easy to get started - the only thing you need is to download JBoss Tools or Developer Studio and it will help you get the remaining dependencies.

Alternatively if you prefer to download everything manually and have access to all quickstarts in on go then simply Download the quickstarts and use the ‘Existing Maven Projects’ Import wizard.

In this wizard you can import a subset or all quickstarts as you see fit. After that JBoss Tools will with help of m2eclipse and m2e-wtp import the projects and you can start trying out JBoss AS 7 or EAP 6.

And as a final touch if you target AS 7 the examples will be setup to use community binaries but if you target EAP 6 we will enable the enterprise flag for the archetypes which will make the created project target EAP productized binaries instead via the usage of the -redhat qualifiers instead.

What if I don’t want to use Maven ?

For easy distribution of quickstarts and making sure it works in the many different environments users work in it is the best option available today.

We do though understand and realize not everyone likes to use Maven for their projects and for this we’ve added a feature in JBoss Tools which allows you to convert a Maven Eclipse project to a “plain” Eclipse project.

The feature is available via right click on any classpath library such as “Maven Dependencies” and is called “Materialize Library”

This feature materializes (i.e. copy) the Maven classpath libraries from being located in ~/.m2/repository to a directory into your project + disabling the Maven Nature and thus you end up with a “Maven free” project.

This means you can use the Maven based quickstarts, import it, apply “Materialize Library” and end up with a project that has no dependency to Maven builds and you can create a build in your favorite alternative build tool.

Everybody wins.

The End

This brings to the end of my blog series concerning the main three features in AS 7 I get excited about: Deployable datasources, Developer Friendly Security and finally the Quickstart Frenzy.

Of course there are plenty of other features in AS 7.0 and 7.1 to get excited about, things like the ~1–4 second startup time, the scritable management API, domain multi node setup, unfied configuration files and more.

But the ones that excites me this time around are the ones that I found to be most helpful for developers and makes tooling integration easier/better.

I’ve told you what excites me in AS 7.1, now I would love to hear what feature of AS 7.1 excites you ?

I’m posting about three features which I have had a personal interest in making it into AS 7.1 and the upcoming JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) 6.

Today the topic is Deployable datasources.

Deployable datasources

Deployable file based datasources (named -ds.xml) have been a feature of JBoss for ages but in the redesign and release of AS 7.0 they did not make it in. Making it an unfortunate requirement for users to have their server running and use either the raw management API or the Admin Console to setup even the simplest datasource. You could do tricks like use @DatasourceDefinition annotations but it is not nice having to compile Java code to just wire up a datasource.

AS 7.1 finally fixes this issue and brings back -ds.xml and even include support for deploying JMS destinations via a -jms.xml file too, but that will be for another blog.

How does such a -ds.xml look like then ? Here is a simple one for a hsqldb running on localhost:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<datasources xmlns="http://www.jboss.org/ironjacamar/schema">
    <datasource 
        jndi-name="java:jboss/datasources/employeedb" 
        enabled="true" 
        use-java-context="true" pool-name="employeedb">
        <connection-url>jdbc:hsqldb:hsql://localhost:1701</connection-url>
        <driver>hsqldb.jar</driver>
        <pool></pool>
        <security>
            <user-name>sa</user-name>
            <password></password>
        </security>
    </datasource>
</datasources>

The XML tags does what you think it does - configure a datasource with the proper JDBC connection url, username, password and so forth.

If you want to know all the details about this file format you can see the IronJacamar documentation for all the options available such as pool sizes.

Armed with this -ds.xml + a matching driver jar, which in this case is named hsqldb.jar you can copy the two files to the deployments folder of AS 7.1 and from then on the datasource named java:jboss/datasources/employeedb can be used by any application running on the server.

Creating -ds.xml with JBoss Tools

I actually did not manually type up that -ds.xml file for my local running hsqldb database, nor did I manually deploy the driver.jar. I used a new wizard that are coming in JBoss Tools 3.3 Beta1 which takes the connection information I already have setup in Eclipse, create the right files for me and if I update the files it will also update the deployments.

Once this wizard have run I simply right click the -ds.xml + driver.jar and select ‘Mark as Deployable’ on them. This deploys them to my server and if I make changes to the -ds.xml the changes gets copied over directly and AS will pick up the changes shortly after.

I find it exciting that we now not only have a file format for defining datasources, but also that they are separate deployable resources together with a driver jar which both can be easily shared on a team.

The fine print

A few caveats/tricks for this approach are:

• I prefer deploying datasources independent of my application, but you can put the -ds.xml inside your application META-INF or WEB-INF directory and it will be deployed together with the application. 
• The JDBC driver needs to be JDBC 4 compatible to be deployable out of the deployment directory. In the rare case your driver is not JDBC 4 compatible then you will need to deploy it as a module in AS 7.
• The datasource can not be modified/managed via the Admin Console since it is a deployed resource and not part of the managed API of AS 7 - if you wish full admin control you will have to configure the datasource via the management API or admin console. As I understand it over time the admin console is set to include support for at least a read-only view of these file based datasources.
• If you wanted to connect to a h2 database you would not need to copy the driver jar, but simply refer to <driver>h2</driver> instead and you it pickup the default embedded h2 database driver in AS 7.

Tomorrow

Tomorrow the topic is on how AS 7.1 is secured by default but is still developer friendly.