Now that the dust is starting to settle from JavaOne it is time to explain what the announcement from JBoss about joining and endorsing NetBeans means in context of Hibernate Tools.
The core of Hibernate Tools have always and will always be independent of any IDE; these are available via our <hibernate-tool> Ant task.
Hibernate Tools for Eclipse will still be developed and improved. At JBossWorld we will have a release with new features and it will be compatible with Eclipse 3.2 and WTP 1.5 (Callisto), and for the brave the nightly builds should soon be the Callisto-based version.
In other words we are not moving away from Eclipse, we are simply recognizing the great work that the NetBeans community have been doing especially with respect to Java EE 5 tooling.
Thus for NetBeans and Hibernate Tools we gladly accepted a contribution from Leon Chiver which brings some of the Hibernate Tools for Eclipse features to the NetBeans platform, primarily the HQL editor (thank you Leon). We expect to also release a preview of this around JBossWorld.
Already with the initial contribution we have created a shared code set for the HQL code completion which actually resulted in merging both of best worlds and improving the functionality in both the Eclipse and NetBeans plugins.
We plan to align the feature set of the IDE tooling with help from the
community and have the plugins share as much code as feasible to allow contributions in both camps
to benefit each other. I look forward to hear from you what features you want the most.
There is more news coming and if you are curious come and hear more about them at JBossWorld Las Vegas. I and others from the Hibernate and JBoss IDE Team will be there.
