The final release of JBoss Tools 3.1 is here!

3.1 Final

Update site changes

The update site for the final release is http://download.jboss.org/jbosstools/updates/stable/galileo.

Users moving from JBoss Tools 3.0 on Eclipse 3.4 to JBoss Tools 3.1 will need to install Eclipse 3.5 and then add the update site. Updating Eclipse major versions just goes easier if you do it like that.

Installation

This is the official version of JBoss Tools that will run on and require Eclipse 3.5 (Galileo). When installing you can either use the remote Update Site or download the update site zip from the main Download for offline installation. In both cases you can pick and choose which plugins/features you want to install.

For some features other dependencies are needed. For example Maven integration requires m2eclipse 0.10. We have done what we can to enable the related update sites, but in case you disabled them explicitly you would need to add or enable them manually. If you have problems with the installation see this

New Features overview

You can read the previous release blogs or read the full What's New and Noteworthy to get all the glory details for the changes between JBoss Tools 3.0 to 3.1.

Following is a few of the highlights.

Additional Server and deployment support

Support for JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) and Enterprise SOA Platform (SOA-P) 5 as well as community JBoss AS 5.x and even AS 6 M1 is supported.

With the Module Assembly Page it is now possible to more finegrained control over the assembly of Web Tools Projects.

We introduced the notion of deploying to SSH enabled hosts allowing for basic remote deployments on the local network or on remote clouds such as Amazon EC2.

Portal

Support for JBoss Portal and it's successor GateIn and Enterprise Portal Platform (EPP) have been added.

JSF 2

JSF 2 is now supported as well as JSF 1 w/facelets with many optimization in the performance of the visual page editor.

New features in JSF 2 such as composite components and resource look ups are now supported in the visual page editor and in the (x)html code completion.

A lot of improvements in the code completion and visual presentation have made it now even easier and faster to write JSF components no matter if you are into editing source code or visual previewing.

Seam

Seam 2.2 support including improved navigation and refactoring of Seam components together with the improvements in JSF support makes JBoss Tools perfect for Seam development.

Hibernate

Hibernate tooling works with connections configured in DTP and Eclipse Dali making it simpler to share connection settings.

If you have an existing Java model you can now easily get either hbm.xml mappings or JPA annotations generated for this model.

Project Examples

It is now easier to get started using JBoss technology by using the Help > Project Examples menu.

More examples have been added and the import have been enhanced to make it more informative about what runtime platforms and versions it will work on.

Maven

Maven users can now easily import their Maven projects with m2eclipse and JBoss Tools Maven integration will configure support for JSF, Maven and Portal development in the IDE.

CDI

The Context and Dependency Injection specification is supported by providing code completion for @Named component and all the code completion, open-on navigation and refactoring that was done for Seam also applies to CDI components.

SOA

SOA tooling have been extended massively by adding support for BPEL on Riftsaw, ESB projects, jbpm4, Drools 5 and Smooks.

Smooks got its own revamped editor and the other editors have been extended and interlinking between the various SOA editors allowing for easy navigation is in place.

ESB Projects allow for easy creation of ESB esb-service and deployment with instant debugging.

...and more!

Have fun!

Episode 10 of JBoss Asylum is out.

In this 10th anniversary episode we talk about the just announced JUDCon (which btw. is JBoss Users and Developer day and not the acronym we came up with in the podcast :), other short news and we have Rich Sharples from Red Hat product management as a guest.

Rich Sharples is a previous Sun employee and he is the product manager of JBoss EAP making it fun to hear his view on how he thinks Oracle have done and will be doing with Sun and Java in the future.

We also touch upon what is the difference between a commercial product and a community project and how they interact.

Go listen at The Asylum Episode 10

JBoss Tools 3.1 CR2 is now available for download.

3.1 Milestone CR2: CDI, Less typing and the last polish...

Almost there

The CR1 release kicked a nerve and we saw a spike in feedback and this CR2 is our answer. A lot of bug fixes and even some requested features made it in via the 450+ issues fixed for this release.

Installation

As the previous 3.1 releases we are targeting Eclipse 3.5.x, but this time we are highly recommending using Eclipse 3.5.1 and if possible the almost to be released Eclipse 3.5.2 because of important bugfixes in core Eclipse and WTP.

Also if you use the Maven integration then we are now working with the just m2eclipse 0.10 and this require you to uninstall m2eclipse 0.9.x to make it work. You can see more about m2eclipse and installation requirements on m2eclipse team blog.

Improvements

My favorite improvements this time around are below. To see the full details and screen shots read What's New.

Contexts and Dependency Injection

We now support Contexts and Dependency Injection (CDI/JSR-299) annotations and it works on any Eclipse Java project, you simply need to go to the Configure menu and enable CDI.

When enabled this gives you nice code completion in EL for @Named beans, allows you to easily navigate to @Injection points via Ctrl+Click or use search for references finds all occurrences where a named bean are used and if you have validation enabled on the project the project will be checked for certain errors in your CDI constructs giving you instant feedback. Refactoring of methods on CDI beans will be reflected in EL expressions.

JSF Editing

You no longer need to type the namespace (i.e. f:) to get code completion to complete within a namespace. For example, code completing on <out will now show you all the <h:output* tags. Couple that together with also no longer having to type #{ to get EL code completions in attributes editing of XHTML documents are now much simpler and faster.

If you had problems in CR1 with code completion not working for your tag libraries these issues should now be gone. In CR1 we added JSF 2 support and we also moved to use dynamic scanning of the project classpath for taglib information, ensuring the code completion will be guaranteed to match what your project actually uses. This change occurred in CR1 but caused problems for users that were not used to include taglib information on their classpath at build time. In CR2 we now provide a fallback for static taglib information if we do not find it on the classpath.

Hibernate

Both the hbm.xml wizard and JPA Annotation Generation functionality now shares the same UI and allows you to specify the depth for the class graph to generate mappings for and any changes can easily be previewed before finishing the wizard.

m2eclipse 0.10

The JBoss Tools Maven integration have been updated to use m2eclipse 0.10. Remember to remove your m2eclipse 0.9 installation first!

Portal

Portal now identifies GateIn as a portal container allowing you to use the existing Portal wizards with GateIn and EPP.

SOA

Creation of ESB actions are now easily done via the New ESB Action Wizard and the ESB Editor now has direct links for creation of actions making it trivial to write custom actions.

Feedback

As always leave a comment, enter our forums, use our JIRA or visit us on IRC to learn about JBoss Tools and give feedback.

Have fun!

Episode 9 of JBoss Asylum is ready for download.

While I was trapped in the snowy mountains, Emmanuel and Michael recorded this podcast which has short news and a talk with Bob McWirther about his work regarding TorqueBox.

They talk about what TorqueBox brings to the table for both Java and Ruby developers and how TorqueBox via the JBoss AS 5 micro-container architecture enables Ruby to run inside AS 5 and optionally utilize the Java environment for its added functionality and especially clustering facilities.

Bob also talks about why he started The CodeHaus, help gave birth to Groovy and how he got involved into JBoss via his Drools and OSS community work.

Go get it at The Asylum Episode 9

When we released JBoss Developer Studio 2.1 we also announced its updatesite at https://devstudio.jboss.com/updates which is for all customers to use. If you are a 2.1 user you have been able to use it to update to JBoss Developer Studio 2.1.1 which includes some minor bug fixes.

We also started an Early Access Program for existing customers of JBoss Developer Studio 3, and this is available from https://devstudio.jboss.com/earlyaccess using the same credentials as customers use for the updatesite.

This Early Access Program gives customers the chance to try out selected milestone builds for the upcoming JBoss Developer Studio 3 and give feedback on the complete JBoss Developer Studio package and not just on the standalone plugins available through the JBoss Tools project.

At the time of writing the release available from the Early Access is JBoss Developer Studio 3 CR1 which is based on Eclipse 3.5 (Galileo), most of the JBoss Tools 3.1.CR1 plugins and supported 3rd party plugins such as TestNG.

Have fun!