It's Beta time for JBoss Tools, the Eclipse plugin suite for JBoss and related technologies.

3.2.0.Beta1

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

Beta Time!

It's beta time, meaning we've locked down new feature additions to most of JBoss Tools and we get to give you the first beta release of JBoss Tools 3.2 - the version of JBoss Tools you should use if you are using Eclipse 3.6 (Helios).

New Features/Improvements

Since it is beta time the focus have been and will be on bugfixing, optimization and stabilization but we do got a few nice new features I would like to highlight - as all ways there is more to see on the What's New page(s).

Faster validation for JSF/XHTML

We've fixed reported issues concerning  performance problems  with validation of XHTML in larger projects. Our  own test project  (100.000's of Expression languages and thousands of  pages) which before  took 15 minutes to validate are now done in much less time when doing a full validation. Making the validation much faster as what is seen in the M2 release. If you continue to have  performance  problems with Beta1 please let us know, since we are still doing improvmements for this area to beta2!

CDI/Seam Validation and Quickfixes

CDI and Seam have all received some more additional validation (i.e. we now valdiate classnames referenced in CDI descriptors) and a good set of quickfixes allowing you to quickly fix common problems.

MyFaces 2 metadata

MyFaces 2 does not ship TLD's within  their project. This make them "invisible" to our default handler for JSF  compoenents since we moved to use classpath based lookups to have more  correct code completion and validation per project. MyFaces does though  ship their own -metadata.xml file that describes their components and  we've added support to parse and recognize these now. This should make  any new components or changes to existing ones in MyFaces show up in the  editor without having to get JBoss Tools updated.

Remote Deployment

JBoss Tools AS Server adapter is now telling the remote server to not scan for changes when remote deployment are done via file copying; preventing "accidental" deployments, making things much more robust.

The remote deployment now also includes optiorns for controlling the start and startup commands used over SSH - allowing you use your own external launch scripts to control how JBoss AS is started/stopped.

Hibernate Comments

HQL (Hibernate Query Language) does not support comments natively, but we have had many requests for allowing it in the Query Editor since it is very useful for quick experiments to be able to comment out parts of your query. Therefore you can now use "--" the beginning of a line to comment it out in the editor. Not a big feature in itself but worth mentioning it since many have asked for it over the years.

Annotation Properties View

We are experiementing with using the new Annotation Properties View which are available via Eclipse WTP JAX-WS support in Helios.

This release therefore are including support for JBoss ESB and JAX-RS (RestEasy) annotations, giving you a more graphical approach to read and write annotations on your service classes.

...and more

Feedback

In M2 we enabled our Usage Tracking and it was a raving success and continues to give us more and more information about where and how JBoss Tools are being used without having users to do anything beyound using our plugins.

We still very much appreciate to hear directly from our users thus don't forget to leave a comment on this blog, post on the forum or report or leave patches to issues on our jira - we love it all.

Have Fun!

We added usage tracking into our JBoss Tools 3.2 M2 release and since then it have been pouring in with pings from all over the world and we love every second of it. Nothing like it, seeing your hard work being used across the planet. Today we've passed 1.000 different cities and the number is ever increasing.

The above screenshot is a snapshot of the current cities we have received pings from over the last week. Darker color and size of the circle indicates the % of visits. For now Brazil and especially the Sao Paolo region has the biggest crowd.

Yesterday we had 2.500+ instances of JBoss Tools starting up within 24 hours and our total of unique Eclipse installs using M2 passed 18.000 this morning.

Very happy to see that much pickup of our M2 release within just a week, I'm very postively surprised so many approved and enabled the tracking and growing every day.

Many thanks for those who did and those who will in the future - it's much more fun than watching simple download counts and give some nice fun content for a Friday blog

Time for Milestone 2 of JBoss Tools, the Eclipse plugin suite for JBoss and related technologies.

3.2.0.M2

[Download] [Update Site]  [What's New] [Movies] [Documentation (not updated yet)]  [Forums]  [JIRA] [Twitter]

New Features Overview

We have a lot of different fixes and improvements in this release and I only touch upon a little in the following; you can see the full change log and What's New and Noteworthy for screenshots.

Usage Tracking

By default we now bundle a Usage Plugin that gathers anonymous usage statistics. You will see a dialog box when you start your Eclipse instance which will ask if you wish to send statistics or not; it is voluntary to participate but we hope you will since it makes us happy to know how and where JBoss Tools are used worldwide.

You can see details on how this work here.

Remote Deployment

JBoss AS Servers now has direct support for doing remote deployment via Eclipse Remote System Explorer (RSE), making any host with a RSE filesystem (SCP, FTP, etc.) a possible target for deploying resources. This can be used to deploy to remote system on the local network or on systems available in the cloud to which you have SCP or FTP access.

Runtime Detection

You no longer have to manually configure individual runtimes within JBoss Tools. We have moved our runtime detection from JBoss Developer Studio into JBoss Tools it self, allowing you to point to a JBoss AS, EAP, SOA-P or EPP installation and have all the supported runtimes (Seam, Drools, etc.) configured inside Eclipse automatically.

Delta Cloud

We are including the first public version of our tooling for Delta Cloud. The Delta Cloud tooling allows you to browse a Delta Cloud installation, manage images, start/stop instances and make them easily available in Eclipse Remote System Explorer which you then can use as targets for the JBoss AS Remote deployment.

Teiid

The Teiid Designer is now bundled in JBoss Tools  allowing you to utilize Teiid's features for federating data and query  its virtualized data models. Going forward there will be even more  integration between Teiid and the rest of the plugin suite, i.e. easy  usage of Teiid datasources when using Hibernate Tools and Seam Entities  generation.

DocBook Editor

There is now a designated editor supporting DocBook documents. Should remove some of the problems users were reporting trying to use the HTML Visual Page Editor for editing DocBook.

Context Dependency Injection

The CDI/Seam team have been providing a lot of feedback to the CDI tooling and this release therefore have a lot of improvements in context of validation messages, Open On's and wizards for CDI.

The Maven integration now also automatically configures CDI and Hibernate if your pom.xml files references CDI or Hibernate artifacts.

Google Web Tool Kit (Experimental)

We have added a GWT Facet to this release allowing you to use Google's (free, but not open) GWT Eclipse tooling in Eclipse WTP projects without manually configuration. This allows you to easily enable GWT for Dynamic Web Projects and deploy it to any WTP enabled server such as JBoss, Tomcat, Glassfish etc.

It is marked Experimental since we hope to convince Google to adopting this into their tooling instead of only having their Google AppEngine limited wizards (cross your fingers ). If you want to try it see this wiki.

..and More - Now Go get it!

As always feedback is welcome and we look forward to hear your input and other contributions.

Have Fun!

We got our first developer milestone build for JBoss Tools which targets Eclipse 3.6/Helios.

3.2.0.M1

[Download] [Update Site]  [What's New] [Movies] [Documentation (not updated yet)]  [Forums]  [JIRA] [Twitter]

Eclipse 3.6/Helios & Java 5

This release is the first milestone that targets Eclipse 3.6/Helios. This means you should only use this with Eclipse 3.6; if you want to stay on Eclipse 3.5 continue to use JBoss Tools 3.1.

Some plugins might still work, but by default the target is Eclipse 3.6.

We also moved our Target Java platform to Java 5 thus if you are still running Java 1.4 on your desktop it is time to upgrade.

Please be aware there a two major known issues with Eclipse 3.5.0, see the "Known Issues" section if you are having problems.

100% Tycho Build

This release of the plugins is the first  release that uses Maven with the Tycho plugin to build and package the  plugin distribution.

Tycho still has its quirks but the quirks are  far far less than "Good'old" PDE Build; we plan to do even faster  release cycles/builds in the future and using Tycho is a major part of  this.

New Features Overview

This milestone covers beyond the Eclipse 3.6 migration and integration new features across the board. The highlights for this release for me is:

JPA 2 Support

Hibernate Tools integration with Eclipse JPA/Dali now supports JPA 2 tooling.

JSF 2 Quick fixes and refactoring

Writing and editing JSF 2 Composite components becomes much easier in this release with quick fixes for missing attributes or folders to composite components and even refactoring of attribute names gets reflected in the interface component section.

Externalize Strings for XHTML

If you know the externalize strings in Eclipse for Java code then you know how the Externalize Strings for XHTML works.

It allows you to select a string, choose externalize String and JBoss Tools will take care of creating the resource bundle if necessary, give it a name and replace the string with the apropriate EL expression. This makes it easier to do internationalization(i18n).

This is a feature we have been asked for a few times thus we are very much interested in hearing feedback on how it works for you.

CDI Wizards and Validation

There are now wizards to create the common annotation types in CDI such as Qualifiers, Sterotypes, Scope and Interceptor Binding.

The validation of CDI constructs have also been further expanded, covering about 60 TCK based validations giving developers an early warning if things are not correctly wired up in the sourcecode.

jBPM 3 Deployment

The deployment mechanism for jBPM within the plugin have been revamped to be more consistent and userfriendly. Removing the need to type too much manually and giving better freedom for how processes can be stored and structured. i.e. before one directory could only have one process, it can now have multiple.

JAX-WS and "Rest" Webservice Tester

Finally but definitly not least is the new "Webservice Tester" which allows you to very easily directly from within Eclipse perform JAX-WS requests or basic "Rest" style requests (read: basic HTTP operations) and inspect the result. If you found the WTP provided Web Service explorer too limited and found other Web Service plugins too complex/heavyweight to install use then give this a try - it's nice and simple.

That were my current highlights, alot of other things were done for this release together with a good set of bugfixes. You can view more details about the above including screenshots on the What's New page.

Known Issues

Unfortunately there are two known issues in Eclipse 3.6.0 and Web Tools 3.2.0 that is affecting JBoss Tools (and many other eclipse plugins) you should be aware of before installing Eclipse 3.6.

If you use Oracle (previously Sun) Java SDK 6 Update 21, then be aware you have to manually specify permgen when starting Eclipse since otherwise you will quickly get an out of memory exception or related error because of this Eclipse bug. Note, any previous Oracle/Sun JDK will work fine, it is only Java 6 Update 21 that is causing problems.

Workaround is to start eclipse with explicit memory arguments, i.e. eclipse -vmargs -Xms256m -Xmx1024m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m

The Web Tools issue is deployment and management of WTP Servers can be very slow for projects with high number of files because of a bug in Eclipse WTP.

Both of these bug is set to be fixed in the soon to be released Eclipse SDK 3.6.1 and WTP 3.2.1.

What's Next ?

The next release (3.2.0.M2) is already being built on and are available in the nightly builds; you can already start using these if you want to and follow the jira and forums for details.

As always feedback is welcome and we look forward to hear your input and other contributions.

Have Fun!

I needed to make some suggestions to the new Webservice testing functionallity bfitzpat is Using the RESTeasy Project Example and the WS Tester.

I wanted to use my little SWT to Balsamiq spy but it turned out this view used a couple of components the "Spy" did not understand,

i.e. TabFolder instead of CTabFolder and others.

I had to fix that, so now http://update.xam.dk contains an updated version which allows me to get a good mockup of the above.

Beyond supporting more components it also now ask's you if you want the full workbench converted into Mockup or

just the current View/Editor.

And finally it stopped exporting unknown controls which caused Balsamiq to show an error dialog per unknown component.

Now it just gets ignored. Much easier.

Hope you like it.

JBoss Tools 3.1.1 with about 100  fixes is now available from the update site and downloads.

Beyond the fixes in JBoss Tools it is also recommended to install the latest patches to Eclipse WTP from their update site. This fixes issues with Classpath libraries that affected those who are using Maven.

Enjoy!