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JBoss Tools 2.1.0.CR1 Released

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While everyone else is having fun at JavaOne we uploaded the candidate release of JBoss Tools 2.1.0 at sourceforge and via the development update site.

This release is mainly 100+ bugfixes/enhancements based on QA and feedback from the last release.

A few new features did make it into 2.1.x and you can see those at new and noteworthy.

To upgrade safely to this release please read the following.

Existing Seam projects

Existing Seam projects will work fine in this new release, except EAR projects with an application.xml should be updated to have something like the following modules: 

<module>
 <web>
  <web-uri>myprj.war</web-uri>
  <context-root>/myprj</context-root>
 </web>
</module>

<module>
 <ejb>myprj-ejb.jar</ejb>
</module>

<module>
 <ejb>jboss-seam.jar</ejb>
</module>

..and nothing else. The <java> elements we generated previously are unnecessary and breaks WTP 2.0.2. The details about why that is are in the following.

Less rigid WTP 2.0.2

We are now targeting WTP 2.0.2+Patches to get some of its important bugfixes.

Unfortunately WTP 2.0.2 introduced a bad regression bug concerning deployment and another bug which makes WTP 2.0.2 very rigid about deploying jar's listed in application.xml via <java> or <ejb> tags unless they have xml descriptors (which is not required in JEE 5).

This affects Seam 1.2 projects and any other projects using binary jars with EJB's in them and projects that uses <java> or <ejb> in application.xml for jars without descriptors which is the case for projects created with previous version of JBoss Tools

To get around these various bugs/features of WTP 2.0.2 we had to do two things:

  1. application.xml in new Seam projects no longer lists jar's in <java> elements to work with WTP 2.0.2. Besides being more correct and standard compliant it also makes the application.xml much smaller so in overall this is a Good thing. Unfortunately existing JBoss Seam projects that uses <java> in application.xml can run into files not being deployed thus we added a EAR validator that will put warnings/errors on offending elements we know can cause problems and with instructions on how to fix it.
  2. We provide a cumulative feature patch to WTP 2.0.2 which removes the rigidness in WTP with respect to JEE jars without descriptors. It is a hack, but it at least allows JEE 5 compliant jars to work instead of causing a exception stacktraces and random behavior in Eclipse.

We had hoped this rigidness could be removed in an update to WTP 2.x, but that does not seem to happen within a decent time frame so we decided to release the patch on our own. Note: WTP 2.0.2+WTP provided patches will work for most users, but we do recommend running with our patch to avoid publishing issues.

Feedback

We plan on going GA within the next few weeks so we encourage you to provide feedback on our forum and jira in case you find something bad or good ;).

p.s. This version of JBoss Tools (sans the experimental parts) will be available in a JBoss Developer Studio 1.1.0.CR1 for JBDS customers soon.

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