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There are a lot of improvements and bugfixes and I just want to pick the most important things for now. You can see a full list of changes in the What’s New section for the release.

You probably already used the tracing functionality for a running Camel Context, but now we are happy to finally give you a Camel Debugger. Using the Eclipse Debug Framework we created our own Camel Debugger which works fully through the design view of the Camel editor. Here you can set your breakpoints (static and conditional ones) and breakpoints hit are highlighted in your design view. Instead of using the "Run as → Local Camel Context" menu you can now use the "Debug as → Local Camel Context" to startup the Context in debug mode. Once a breakpoint is hit Eclipse will automatically change to the Eclipse Debug perspective.

Step through your routes, add watch expressions, change message content on the fly or simply monitor what your routes do with the messages. Add a conditional breakpoint if you only want to debug on a certain condition. You choose the condition language and you setup the condition in an easy to use expression builder.

Over the past weeks we worked on improvements regarding the usability of our Camel Route Designer. The result of that work is that we introduced a new drawer to the palette of the designer which provides easy to use items for Apache Camel Components. In the past you had to know that the Endpoint palette entry has to be used to create a connector for a Camel component just by prepending the right protocol name to the endpoints uri attribute field. That still left you alone in adding the correct Maven dependency to your projects pom.xml. When you now drop a component connector to the route the pom.xml gets updated automatically so you don’t need to care any longer.

Starting with version 2.14 the Apache Camel developers started implementing a model to determine URI parameters and their meta data. We now use the provided functionality to give our users improved property pages for the Apache Camel Components.

(the above image shows the properties for a file connector endpoint)

Our server adapters have been reworked and we now provide adapters for the latest version of Apache ServiceMix, Apache Karaf and JBoss Fuse.

The wizard pages for creating the servers have been reworked too and you are now able to download the binaries directly from within your Eclipse session.

Another thing to mention is that we replaced the old deployment options in favor to the modules publishing way using the servers view. You can select the server entry there and choose to Add or Remove modules to/from the server. The deployed projects from your local workspace will be visible as a child node under the server item. Depending on your settings for the server publishing options your application will be republished automatically when it gets out of sync / is changed locally.

I hope you enjoy the new stuff. Have fun!

Lars Heinemann

This version of JBoss Tools targets Eclipse Mars 4.5 (M5).

We recommend using the Eclipse 4.5 JEE Bundle since then you get most of the dependencies preinstalled.

Once you have installed Eclipse, you use our update site directly:

Note: Marketplace entry and Integration Stack tooling will become available from JBoss Central at a later date.

As always there is more than can be covered in a single blog but here are some of my favorites. You can see everything in the What’s New section for this release.

The initial work on providing a structured editor for Java EE 7 Batch job.xml files are in. The editor is based on Eclipse Sapphire and over time we want to extend it for smarter content assist both in the structured editor but also in the source view.

Furthermore for Java EE 7 we’ve now added auto enablement of CDI for Java EE 7 projects. Meaning the tools also now honor Java EE 7 CDI spec about no longer requiring beans.xml for activating CDI.

BrowserSim adds skins and layout for iPhone 6 devices.

These skins and others are also available in BrowserSim Standalone mode which allow you to run Browersim without depending on a full Eclipse install.

You can use this "oneliner" to try it out:

If you are on OSX you need this one:

We’ve extended the HTML5 palette to allow easier adding of often used html5 elements.

This grew the palete to be rather big thus we came up with adding a 'Most popular' slot so you always have easy access to the elements you used most often.

The following video shows how that works.

If you are a FeedHenry user we’ve now added support for easy importing and running of your FeedHenry Cordova applications.

Apache Cordova support now includes support for Windows Phone projects (requires you to run on Windows still though :)

This also adds support for running Windows Phone Emulator.

This feature is actually part of Eclipse M5 and not directly JBoss Tools but I wanted to mention it because the feature is awesome and it was contributed by us by the great work of Mickael Istria.

In Eclipse M5 the Project Explorer now have a "Projects Presentation" in its view menu. Allowing you to switch from the traditional "Flat" view to the new "Hiearchical". This new option lets you view the projects as they are structured on the filesystem as opposed to one big flat list.

This is especially super helpful for those who have large multimodule Maven projects. Now you can get some sanity back.

While we wait for feedback on Alpha1, we are already working on what will become Alpha2. Some of the things that are moving here are:

As always, ask/suggest away and we’ll keep you posted!

Have fun!

Max Rydahl Andersen
@maxandersen