Today we are releasing with the first Alpha of JBoss Tools 4.1 and Developer Studio 7.0 targeting Eclipse 4.3 also known as the Kepler release.

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

This release is an alpha and is built against Kepler M5 (Eclipse 4.3M5a), and as such things can and will still change before the final Kepler release. 

We therefore recommend you use the JBoss Developer Studio installer to be sure you got the right Eclipse distribution, but you can of course use JBoss Tools updatesite (note: url has changed since the Juno based release) if you wish - just be sure you are using Eclipse 4.3M5a / Kepler M5 when doing so.

Improvements

As mentioned above we are now targeting Eclipse Kepler to pickup the new features, bugfixes and performance improvements made since Eclipse Juno - we are releasing this Alpha to get early feedback on our tools but just as much on Kepler so we can actually get any remaining issues fixed before the release train ships this summer. Please report bugs to us or eclipse.org directly if you find an issue that is reproducible even without JBoss Tools installed.

Beyond that a few other highlights sneaked into this Alpha...

JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6.1 Alpha Support

Last week Mark Little announced that EAP 6.1 Alpha is now freely available for Developers and you can get it from JBoss AS download page. This release of tools provides support for EAP 6.1 Alpha.

Note: we will soon have an update to JBoss Tools 4.0 and Developer Studio 6.0 to provide similar support but if you want to get started today with the alpha of JBoss EAP use this alpha tooling with it.

BrowserSim w/Firebug

BrowserSim now includes Firebug for easy inspection of dom and css styles.

Content assist for JSF xml namespace

XML namespace (xmlns) content assist now looks at your other pages and a list of standard xmlns when you are editing JSF pages and insert

the appropriate xmlns declaration if your page is missing it. Alexey made a nice video showing how this works.

CDI DeltaSpike 0.3

The initial DeltaSpike CDI integration now work with DeltaSpike 0.3.

Forge updates

Forge tools now bundles Forge 1.2

Maven JPA/JSF/JAX-RS Configurators moved to Eclipse

As Fred wrote earlier we contributed the JPA/JSF/JAX-RS Configurators we made to the m2e-wtp project at eclipse.org

and so in this Kepler release we no longer bundle our own but rely on the new. This means the configuration of these

moved under the main Maven > Java EE Integration preference.

These configurators enables the JSF, JPA and JAX-RS tooling if your maven pom and project are depending or

using these features.

Giving Feedback

There are more news and screenshots in What's New, and if you got an idea to an improvement or found a bug do not hestiate to open an issue in our issue tracker.

What's Next ?

We are not standing still and our roadmap for the upcoming release includes JQuery Mobile support in our palette and html5 source editor, a whole new feature using LiveReload, Apache Cordova tooling and simulator, Better JavaScript support in Eclipse, easier management of your OpenShift applications and more...

Follow this blog for more or contact us on our forum and irc if you are interested in contributing!

And don't forget....Have fun!