The Early Access site for JBoss Developer Studio now contains CR1 free for download and if you want the JBoss Enterprise Application platform bundled you just need to and sign up for the early access program here.

Improvements

This release contains a few improvements over the last couple of betas that are worth mentioning.

Most of these stems from the change we made from using the horrible dropin feature of Eclipse to have a proper

P2 enabled Eclipse product build. This should make things like installation, startup and updates much smoother, simpler and in some cases faster.

New Directory Layout

There is no longer a seperate "eclipse" directory; everything related to JBoss Developer Studio is now in the "studio" folder and

instead of using raw eclipse to start you now uses the jbdevstudio, jbdevstudio.exe or the JBoss Developer Studio.app dependent on your

platform to launch.

If you have installed the EAP bundle jboss-eap still lives in <install>/jboss-eap.

Runtime Detection/Setup

You can still use the "Server" page in the installer to setup JBoss server runtimes, but all this that was previously isolated in the installer is now also available from inside JBoss Tools under the Preferences for "JBoss Tools Runtime Detection". Here you can configure directories to scan for runtimes and it supports not only Server runtimes, but also standalone framework runtimes like Seam and Drools.

Welcome Screen

You will also now be greeted with a new shiny Welcome Screen:

...and of course the latest stable fixes and features from JBoss Tools 3.2.

Have fun!

Over the past few weeks, I have started the integration of Seam Forge into JBoss Tools. Today I am happy to present the first results of this work.

Installation

If you are familiar with the Eclipse platform the installation should be a breeze for you. The easiest way is to download a recent Eclipse version and use the 'Help->Install New Software...' wizard to install the latest and greatest JBoss Tools from the update site. Don't forget to include the Maven integration for Eclipse as we will need it later on. After this, use the same mechanism to install the forge tools from this update archive. Restart Eclipse and you should be set to go.

Starting and Stopping

Now that the installation is dealt with, let's have a look whether everything went ok. You can bring up the "Forge Console View" by selecting 'Window->Show View->Other...' and then 'Seam Forge->Forge Console'.

As you can see the Forge Console View has a toolbar and a dropdown menu that allow you to start and stop Forge. The initial message pane indicates that Forge is not running. Let's get going and push the 'Start Forge' button.

After a while, the Forge welcome banner appears and you are invited to enter forge commands. The very convenient tab completion suggesting the list or possible commands does not work yet, but you can get the suggestions anyway by pressing tab followed by a return. Also, the coloring is not yet enabled like when using Forge directly in a terminal window. When you're done working you can stop Forge by pushing the 'Stop Forge' button.

Create a Project

To make things a bit more interesting, let's try the tutorial from Lincoln's blog. We create a new project called 'foo' with top level package 'org.foo':

[no project] workspace $ new-project --named foo --topLevelPackage org.foo

Now the project is created but unfortunately, we cannot see it in our workspace. This is one of the obvious features that need to be added. For now, we have to import the project in the workspace. Here is where the Maven plugins come into play. For Forge projects are indeed Maven projects too. Select 'File->Import...' and then 'Maven->Existing Maven Project'. Point the wizard at the workspace root and the 'foo' project should show up in the list of projects to import. After importing the project shows up in the package explorer.

We enter the next few commands from the tutorial:

[foo] foo $ install forge.scaffold

[foo] foo $ new-entity --named Person

[foo] Person.java $ new-field string --fieldName firstName

[foo] Person.java $ new-field string --fieldName lastName

[foo] Person.java $ cd ..

[foo] domain $ scaffold generate-metawidget-jsf *.java

To see which changes are performed in the project by these commands we need to refresh the project.

Again, it would be good if after issuing each command the relevant changes would be highlighted by setting the relevant folder, file or file element selected. This is more work for the future.

The Future

As suggested, a lot more work is waiting... Some of the features that are on the list are:

• Adding a preference page to be able to add and select Forge runtimes.
• Support for tab completion suggesting the list of possible commands.
• Support for command history.
• Support for colors in the Eclipse Forge Console.
• Show appropriate feedback after each command.
• etc.

If you are interested in helping out implementing some of these features or if you just want to view the code implementing the current console, you can find the sources in the JBoss Tools SVN.

Happy forging!

Koen

BPEL in SOA-P

Let's face it,BPEL has become the de facto standard for building industrial strength business work flows, despite the fact that it is not for the faint of heart and, much like suicide by lapidation, it requires a strong will and determination to get through the pain.

Red Hat/JBoss recognized the importance of BPEL in the enterprise quite a while ago and as a result, a WS-BPEL 2.0 compliant engine and tooling is being offered as a “Technical Preview” in SOA-P 5.1, which is due to release sometime this spring.

The BPEL tooling and runtime will also be available in JBoss Developer Studio 4 as a Technical Preview and in JBoss Tools, the community (free!) edition.

Technical Preview simply means that it will be bundled with SOA-P but it will not be officially supported until the 5.2 release scheduled for this summer. However, we the developers will still do our best to respond to feature and bug fix requests from the community, as always.

The Runtime

Riftsaw, which is the BPEL engine that ships with the above mentioned products, is based on Apache ODE version 1.3.4 and in fact, JBoss developers have been very active in the ODE community and have been instrumental in determining the future direction of the project.

The Riftsaw engine is optimized for the JBoss Application Server and supports a variety of features which you can read about in the project pages here.

Startup and shutdown of Riftsaw and deployment of business processes to the engine, as well as control of process instances can be done either through the Eclipse tooling, or using the BPEL Console shown below. Before you start, make sure that your JBoss Application Server environment is installed and configured correctly and you have installed Riftsaw as described in the User Guide.

The “Servers”view is used to manage the Riftsaw engine from the Eclipse tooling, as shown here:

To create a new server instance in Eclipse, simply select “New” from the Servers View context menu (right-click) and follow the wizard; first select the JBoss App Server version.  Currently this must be 5.1.0.GA - support for AS 6.0 is being considered for a future release.

Next, select the AS installation directory:

and finally, deploy your processes - that's all there's to it!

The Tooling

Over a year ago, JBoss made the very difficult decision to fork the Eclipse BPEL Designer source because apparently the original development team was unable to commit the time and resources to maintain the editor, for whatever reasons and the project has been floundering until recently. Since then a lot of improvements and bug fixes have been made and the BPEL editor is finally stable enough to be considered a beta release! Not only are there other Eclipse projects  that depend on, and use the BPEL Designer, but it has been officially integrated into our QA cycle.

In the coming months these fixes and enhancements will be pushed back upstream to the Eclipse code line and made available to the community. The plan is to rekindle community interest in this project and eventually have it be self-sustaining so that we can finallyretire our forked code line. The fact that we have been able to gain some measure of control over the code at eclipse.org will make this task much simpler.

What's Next?

We still have some features we'd like to see implemented in the editor and runtime, such as:

• Execution simulation and in situ runtime debugging.
• WS-HumanTask or BPEL4People support.
• Clustering to support HA and load balancing.
• Solidifying the BPEL Designer plug-in extension API, especially BPEL extension activities.
• A new “Design” page with a simplified GUI which could be offered as a “BPEL Lite” page vs the current “BPEL Classic” designer.
• A new "Overview" page that simplifies partner link and WSDL management.
  

The current graphical UI has long been criticized for being less than user friendly and several ideas have been tossed around which would improve the user experience. We hope to implement each of these as time permits.

How You Can Help

The reason for offering BPEL as a Technical Preview is so that early adopters can get their hands on new technology goodies to start playing with them and provide us with valuable feedback! This will help us shake out bugs and help us offer a better product. But this only works if you, the users, provide us with that feedback.

So if you are an early adopter and run across a bug, or you see a need for a new feature/enhancement, please let us know by posting to the JBoss or Riftsaw community user forums. For BPEL Designer-specific issues and questions, you can also post directly to the Eclipse BPEL project forum.