Today we are releasing JBoss Tools 2.1.0.Beta. Go download it or use the development update site.
Important: Use Eclipse Europe Fall / WTP 2.0.1, do not use Eclipse Europe Winter / WTP 2.0.2 since it has a regression bug around deployment. We will have that fixed or worked around for 2.1.GA.
In this release we have the usual bug fixes and a good set of new features and improvements.
We compiled a list of the new and noteworthy with screenshots and videos of the new features. The reference documentation is available at docs.jboss.org, and if you want the full Release notes look here.
My favorite new improvements for this release are described below.
Open Seam component, Find References/Declarations
One of my most wanted feature for Seam tooling have been to quickly open Seam components and be able to find which EL expressions that refer to my components. That is now possible with Ctrl+Shift+Z that gives you an Open Seam Component dialog and Ctrl+Shift+G in Java now includes matches found in .xhtml, pages.xml, components.xml etc.
Flexible project structure for Seam projects
This feature is for all the maven, seam-gen-commandline and I want my own project structure
-fan users out there.
We now expose all the various folder and project settings in the Seam project preferences to allow you to configure to your favorite project structure and thus still be able to use the Seam artifact wizards such as New Action, New Entity etc.
Safer incremental deployment
We now use JMX calls to suspend and resume JBoss's automatic deployment to ensure the incremental deployments gets fully copied before the files are redeployed by the container.
Big performance and memory usage improvements
Both the Seam Model and the Visual Page Editor have been profiled for hotspots and memory usage. The biggest issues have been fixed in this release. Visual Page editing is now faster and existing Seam projects opens faster.
Experimental 64-bit build
This release includes an experimental build of the tools which includes a 64-bit Linux XULRunner that should allow you to go fully 64-bit. Let us know how that works out.
Experimental JBoss ESB xml editor
We started work on a jboss-esb.xml structured editor similar to what we have done earlier for components.xml. It is still in an early stage, but let us know what you think about it.
Final words
Thanks to the whole JBoss Tools team for making this happen and especially a big thanks to all the feedback and bugreports we received from users!
There is more to this release so go take a look at new and noteworthy and enjoy the beta.
We encourage you to continue to dig into the new features and post your feedback on our forum and jira so we can get even closer to GA.
p.s. These features (sans the experimental parts) will be be available in a JBoss Developer Studio 1.1.0.Beta for JBDS customers soon.
