JBoss tools for Eclipse get a Juno refresh

The JBoss developers at Red Hat have announced the release of JBoss Tools 4 and JBoss Developer Studio 6. JBoss Developer Studio is the company's custom distribution of the open source Eclipse IDE targeted at developing applications for the JBoss middleware. This includes the majority of JBoss tools, which are a set of Eclipse plugins that enhance the IDE's JBoss support. The developers recommend that users who want a solution that "just works" should use Developer Studio, whereas individuals who enjoy doing their own "bleeding edge eclipse plugin assembly" might prefer to use the JBoss Tools with their own installation of Eclipse.

With the new releases, the complete JBoss Tools code base is now hosted on GitHub, and both the JBoss Tools and the Developer Studio distribution now target Eclipse 4 "Juno". The developers have also introduced a new BYOE ("Bring Your Own Eclipse"), which allows users to install the supported plugins from JBoss Developer Studio in their own Eclipse installation from the Eclipse Marketplace. This includes the majority of the JBoss Tools plugins, but not all of them. As the developers point out: "Boss Tools has a few extra, but unsupported plugins you can pick and choose from and JBoss Developer Studio BYOE is exactly the supported plugins."

New JBoss Developer Studio 6 features, part 1

New JBoss Developer Studio 6 features, part 2

OpenShift-related tools in JBoss Developer Studio see a large number of improvements. As the latest OpenShift version uses MongoDB 2.2, the plugins have been updated to support this version of the NoSQL database as well. Users can now use more than one server and they once again have access to application log files right from Eclipse. This function was temporarily unavailable because of changes introduced by the previous OpenShift release. The introduction of as-you-type validation for CDI constructs is also supposed to help developers find errors immediately instead of only when they save their work.

Detailed information about both releases is available from the release announcement. An additional list of changes in the JBoss Tools can be found in the News and Noteworthy page for the product. Downloads for JBoss Tools 4 and Developer Studio 6 are available from the JBoss web site.

(fab)