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A few days ago we released JBoss Tools 4.2 Beta3 for Eclipse Luna.

In that update was also a change to our update site urls that we recommend for testing our Nightly builds.

In the past if you used http://download.jboss.org/jbosstools/updates/nightly/core/master/ we recommend you start using the following instead:

Nightly Update Site: http://download.jboss.org/jbosstools/updates/nightly/luna/

Note the 'luna' segment in the URL above indicates this site targets Eclipse 4.4 (Luna). Once we begin building on Eclipse 4.5 (Mars), there will be a new URL with a 'mars' segment.

Why the change ?

To understand why we are changing it its good to try understand how our builds for JBoss Tools is setup to have commits in builds be picked up by Jenkins which then publishes the result to our nightly build update sites.

The following picture is a simplification of the process and how the bits moves through the various sites and gets community tested.

We have ~40 repositories with more or less independent plugin sets in our Github jbosstools organization. When these change we build an update site for each of them and when one is built the content gets aggregated into an "uber" jbosstools update site.

In the beginning this was not a big problem but over the years with more traffic and more frequent builds users risk having update errors because during their update the build from which they were updating could be overwritten with a newer one.

To remedy this we now offer a composite of the latest nightly builds instead. This means that parsing the site’s metadata will be slightly slower but after that the download speed will be the same, and you should now rarely encounter the above issue.

Another advantage is that with this site you can now revert to an earlier nightly build, in case that works better.

Thus, in short - if you are willing to test our JBoss Tools nightly builds - please use this as your update site:

http://download.jboss.org/jbosstools/updates/nightly/luna/

Talking about nightly builds…

If you are trying out latest nightly builds why not signup as part of JBoss Tools CAT member and help by giving us feedback to know if we are going in the right direction ?

To do this start here.

Have fun!

Max Rydahl Andersen
@maxandersen

Happy to announce JBoss Tools 4.2 Beta3 and Red Hat JBoss Developer Studio 8 Beta3 for Eclipse Luna is now available.

Installation

JBoss Developer Studio comes with everything pre-bundled in its installer. Simply download it and install it like this:

java -jar jboss-devstudio-{version}-installer-{standalone|eap}.jar

JBoss Tools or JBoss Developer Studio Bring-Your-Own-Eclipse (BYOE) requires a bit more:

This release requires at least Eclipse 4.4 (Luna) but we recommend using the Eclipse 4.4 JEE Bundle since then you get most of the dependencies preinstalled.

Once you have installed Eclipse, you either find us on Eclipse Marketplace under "JBoss Tools (Luna)" or "JBoss Developer Studio (Luna)".

For JBoss Tools you can also use our update site directly if you are up for it.

http://download.jboss.org/jbosstools/updates/development/luna/

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

What is new ?

This release is mainly a bunch of bug fixes but also a few new features and a very important regression fix.

Better Plugin Management for Apache Cordova

Our Hybrid Mobile Tools now supports automatically downloading the plugins listed in your config.xml giving you two benefits:

Allow you to exclude the physical plugin binaries from your source control
On import the right plugin will be fetched dynamically, great for sharing examples and code.

Also don’t forget we have proposed and contributed Hybrid Mobile Tools at Eclipse under Eclipse Thym.

CordovaSim is now less meme-compatible

CordovaSim using Ripple had a "easter-egg" in the sense when you used a Cordova plugin that the Ripple engine did not understand would show a dialog titled "I Haz Cheeseburger?!?!". Great for those with a great love for internet memes but it was not very informative.

Now we provide a less meme heavy dialog letting the user know what plugin that is not supported and allow you to not have to see the message again.

Btw. if you use a popular and/or important plugin that is not supported open a jira or PR against CordovaSim.

Ionic framework in palette

We’ve added support for Ionic framework. Ionic is a AngularJS based framework that provides nice mobile components that works especially well with Cordova based application.

Maven Central archetype catalog

One of the improvements in m2e 1.5 for Luna was that it no longer by default download the Nexus indexes for all repositories by default. It was simply too slow.

Thus that had to go but by removingt this the list of archetypes for the 'New Maven Project' was heavily reduced.

In Beta3 we’ve added the Maven Central Archetype catalog meaning you get access to ~9600 archetypes in a few seconds vs several minutes in pre m2e 1.5 days.

Review commit changes when pushing to OpenShift

When pushing changes to OpenShift and you have uncommitted changes we now show a variation of the standard git commit dialog allowing you to be selective about what files you want to get committed/added before your push.

Review changes before committing to OpenShift

JMX Navigator grouping of connections

With all the great additions to the JMX tooling in last beta we realized the JMX Navigator view could benefit from having its connections grouped by type.

Allows you to more easily find what you are looking for and when auto-discovered connections come and go the view stays stable.

Fixed incremental deployment regression

…and finally we fixed a rather severe regression in our server tools. The server adapter were triggering full redeployments if your project had certain type or module or jar dependencies.

Making your development workflow really slow compared to the more or less instant feedback you should get when just updating dynamic content like html or jsf.

Sorry for having that broken but now it is fixed - thus if you felt the server publishing was slow then please try it now! It should be back to its fast self again.

…and more

There are more improvements covered in the more detailed: What’s New.

What is Next

This Beta is the last planned Beta for JBoss Tools 4.2 and Developer Studio 8. The next release is set to be the candidate release thus please do try this release out and give feedback to make sure you’ll have a good experience with JBoss Tools on Eclipse Luna!

Let us know what you think in the comments below!

Hope you enjoy it and remember…