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

JBoss Developer Studio 8 Splashscreen

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:

  1. Allow you to exclude the physical plugin binaries from your source control

  2. 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.

Plug-in not supported dialog

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.

Ionic palette

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.

Maven Central Archetype Catalog

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.

JMX Navigator group by connection type

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…​

Have fun!

Max Rydahl Andersen
@maxandersen

In our recent milestone releases of JBoss Tools 4.2 we’ve started gathering additional data from those who are have agreed sending back anonymous usage data to us (Thank you!).

Reminder: As always, this is my personal interpretation of the data and again it is early days for the data collection. These numbers are just for the last month of beta testers thus do take these absolute numbers with a grain of salt!

In any case I find the numbers interesting and thought I would share since there are some lessons to be learned.

JBoss Server Usage

One of the data points are which JBoss servers users create.

Mind you we don’t collect the exact version of the server installed, just which server adapter users are using - i.e. EAP 6.1 also covers EAP 6.2 and 6.3, WildFly 8 covers 8.0 and 8.1 etc.

server creation stats

The numbers above shows the last two weeks of server creation by our beta users. Not surprisingly majority of users are using the community version of the latest JBoss servers (AS 7.1 and WildFly 8), and it’s great to see the third most used server is the free for development/enterprise supported EAP 6.1/6.2/6.3.

Oldie but goodie

What I find funny is that there are still users using the latest/greatest development tools, but who runs JBoss AS 3.2 - this was last released back in 2006! Talk about dedication :)

Importance of Multiple runtime support

What the list shows to me is the importance of development tools need to support multiple versions because even though most are using latest/greatest runtime there are still a great bunch of users that will be using older versions of runtimes. Many developers tend to forget or blissfully ignore this.

I’m convinced as users move to our release that gathers these data we will start see even higher numbers of "older" runtime usage.

Deploy Only Server

What is a bit disconcerting is how few seem to know about our Deploy only server (in this list noted as systemCopyServer ). This server allows you to use Eclipse’s support for incremental deployments to any directory locally or remotely available. Really useful for deploying to a non-JBoss server, a remote PHP or just a plain html app.

You should try it out!

File  New  Server  Basic  Deploy Only

Combine this with our LiveReload support and you get a great and fast workflow!

Uptake of Eclipse versions

Another data item we have insight to is the uptake of Eclipse versions.

Uptake of Eclipse versions

The graph above is our recorded startups of Eclipse Java EE installs since January pr. week. Be aware the versions listed are the EPP versions, not Eclipse release train versions - I’ll do the mapping for you below.

Two things to note: the "Drop" at the end is just the effect of the numbers ending middle of the month, the "Dip" in mid April I’m not sure what is but we see it across all our Google analytics thus I expect it was an Google Analytics anomoly. The numbers have since stabilized, that said…​lets interpret!

This graph shows how Eclipse Kepler SR1 release (2.0.1) usage is dropping as users upgrade to Kepler SR2 release (2.0.2) - this are most likely the effect of users using Eclipse built-in update mechanism to upgrade.

What also can be seen is that the latest stable release (4.4.0) uptake is gaining faster than total Eclipse version usage (the faint lines are even older eclipse versions). Meaning total usage of JBoss Tools is up/stable. Eclipse isn’t dead yet :)

I wish Google Analytics had a way to show this graph cumulative instead of per line…​anyone up for a data extraction and visualization project ? I’ll give you access to the data to play with.

Uptake of Eclipse Luna

Finally, my personal main interest was to see what the uptake of Eclipse Luna is.

You can see what effect a GA release of Eclipse has. The red line is Eclipse Luna going from a couple of hundreds starts to now 7.000 starts pr. week since its release - but do notice that there is no corresponding drop (yet) in Kepler. Looks like most are installing Luna next to their Kepler installs (my theory at least ;)

This mimicks previous years uptake patterns and once everyone gets back from vacation and Luna SR1 release comes out it should be close to the level of Eclipse Kepler installs. Good to see users continue to picking up latest greatest features and bugfixes!

I’ll go look at the numbers again in a few months to see if the trend continues.

If there is some additonal data you are interested or questions about the above let me know in comments and I’ll try include/answer it!

Have fun!

Max Rydahl Andersen
@maxandersen

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