Java 8 is now a minimum requirement to run JBoss Tools. JBoss Tools continues to support running servers and applications with older Java versions.

If JBoss Tools is run on an older Java version, a warning dialog appears:

JBoss Tools is now targeting Eclipse Mars.1 as a running platform.

JBoss Tools now integrate new UI entry-points to simplify import of existing projects. This alternative mechanism scans a given folder of the filesystem to detect different kinds of existing projects (Eclipse projects, Maven projects, Cordova projects, Java EE projects, JavaScript projects…​) to import and configure them at best inside the IDE. The difference with existing import strategies is that user isn’t required to know how to import a given project, and can now focus on what to import and rely on the IDE to take care of how to do it.

The entry-points for this import are:

Dependent classes for the same package are added with addClasses(…​) instead of using addClass on each individual package.

An archive can be exported by right-clicking an archive entry in the Arquillia Cruiser view and selecting the Export Archive action.

Arquillian warns that known EE descriptor files are not in the correct location.

Arquillian now includes a Maven configurator that configures Arquillian capabilities if a project includes Arquillian classes. The configurator is disabled by default.

The Arquillian JUnit Test Case wizard has an option to add dependent classes for a class under test.

The Arquillian Working Set Filter filter shows all projects that are placed in the same working set as the selected project.

A new wizard allows you to import Cordova Applications from FeedHenry to take advantage of the Cordova features and the CordovaSim on JBoss Tools.

Hybrid Mobile(Cordova) projects now support Windows Phone. The new Windows Phone allows cordova projects to run on Windows Phone emulator directly from JBoss Tools. It also provides export support for Windows Phone applications and native projects.

You can now select the Cordova version per platform. This allows you to mix and match different Cordova version to best accommodate the requirements of your application.

Uses improved iconography and better connection handling.

Cordova engine downloads have switched to use npm to improve the reliability of the downloads. Download dialog is also refreshed to adjust to this change.

A new wizard allows you to convert a hybrid mobile project to a FeedHenry application. The wizard creates a client application on the FeedHenry cloud and configures the git repository for the project.

A new JavaEE 7 Batch job XML editor is available in JBoss Tools 4.3. The editor has three tabs:

Batch artifact and property references are validated in Job XML files:

There are Quick Fixes available for the following validation problems:

The Quick Fixes open a pre-set New Batch Artifact wizard to create the missing artifact:

Search for references (Ctrl+Shift+G) works for batch artifact classes and its property fields. For example if you have a batchlet class:

then results for SearchableBatchlet references will include the corresponding Job XML file:

When you rename some class name or property field then the corresponding Job XML references will be renamed too:

New Batch Job XML wizard is available in New→Others→Batch menu and creates a new Batch Job XML file:

This wizard allows to create batch artifacts, such as:

We have fixed a critical performance issue with JBoss Knowledge Base builder for project with large JAR libraries that contain Batch artifacts. For example, if your Maven project has a dependency on glassfish-embedded-all.jar then it could take more than 5 minutes to build the project just because of this dependency. Now, it takes seconds.

Apache Cordova Project is now doing individual releases per platform (Android / Windows Phone / IOS). This functionality is now available for CordovaSim. One can specify cordova engine via Properties → Hybrid Mobile Engine:

The "Run BrowserSim" command is now available in the "Quick Access" for every single perspective:

Now an optional url parameter can be added to the BrowserSim command when writing Cheet Sheets. The usage is the following:

Brand new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus skins are now available in BrowserSim and CordovaSim:

For whose who do not use Eclipse / JBoss Developer Studio, there is a standalone mode of BrowserSim. However, only SWT WebKit web engine used to be supported. Now there is a possibility to run BrowserSim standalone against JavaFx web engine which provides features like Dev Tools Debugger and JavaScript logging in the console.

CordovaSim has gained basic FeedHenry support. Now it is possible to run FeedHenry hybrid apps against both local and remote Node.js server:

From now on all specific preferences (UI themes, tabs order, settings, etc.) are saved on CordovaSim close.

Now there is a security warning for "Remote" proxy. Basically, If the app is transferring sensitive data (authentication tokens, credentials etc.), it is strongly recommended to use "Local" proxy instead of the "Remote" one.

CDI Tools now support CDI 1.2 projects. If your CDI project (with enabled CDI support) has CDI 1.2 JARs in its classpath, CDI Tools recognizes it as CDI 1.2 project automatically. There is no need to use any special settings to distinguish CDI 1.2 from CDI 1.1 or 1.0.

The new beans.xml wizard allows to choose the CDI version: 1.0, 1.1 or 1.2

CDI Tools now automatically enables CDI support for the project when the following Java EE 7 facets are installed: Web (Servlet) 3.1 or higher, EJB 3.2 or higher or Utility module. For example, if you create a brand new Web Dynamic project with Web (Servlet) version 3.1 and any Java EE 7 targeting server, CDI support is automatically enabled. Additionally, JBoss Tools still enables CDI support for the maven projects if the project has CDI dependencies. However, this feature is only avaialble when the Maven CDI integration plugin is installed.

Each CDI validation problem message refers to the corresponding CDI specification paragraph. Message and specification referrals now depend on the CDI version used in the project. For example:

The connection wizard support both Unix sockets and REST API to connect to a Docker engine. The wizard requires a unique name to identify the connection and checks the required permissions on the Unix socket and on the path to the certificates for TCP connections.

The new "Docker Explorer" view displays containers and images in a tree view, with filters to hide dangling and intermediate images and stopped containers. The container icons have decorators to indicate their state (running, paused or stopped).

The new "Containers" view displays the same information that appears when using the docker ps or docker ps -a commands in a terminal.

The new "Images" view displays the same information that appears when using the docker images command in a terminal.

The new "Run Image" wizard lets users run an image by passing the most relevant arguments in the context of a developer machine:

The Pull Image wizard can be launched from the Docker Images view or from the Docker Explorer view:

The wizard detects the tag in the image name and if none is specified, the image tagged latest is pulled.

If the user needs to search a specific image name, she can click on the Search…​ button which will open the Search wizard:

This is followed by a second page that displays all the tags for the selected image:

Even though this wizard can only search from Docker Hub, users can still pull images from other third-party registries. When doing this, the image name must contain a prefix with the registry host and port, for example 192.168.59.103:5000/centos:7.

The Docker Tools also includes a launcher to build images from a Dockerfile.

The source path is a directory in the workspace or on the file system and the Docker Connection combo box specifies on which Docker daemon the image will be built.

The Properties view responds to the selection on an Image or a Container in the aforementioned views to display general and detailed information.

The push, display logs, commit, and tag commands are also available from contextual menus and view toolbars.

The included Forge runtime is 2.19.2.Final.

Start the Forge runtime using the Ctrl+4 (or Cmd+4) key combination.

Freemarker library included in Fremarker IDE was updated to latest available version 2.3.22.

The Freemarker editor now displays hyperlinks for #include directives that reference a file in the same directory. #include directives with relative/absolute paths and acquisitions are not supported.

The following new core Hibernate Tools releases have been published:

These four new releases with their specific Hibernate ORM dependencies have been included in the corresponding Hibernate runtime provider plugins in the 4.3.0.CR1 release of JBoss Tools.

The wizard to create new Hibernate configuration files (*.cfg.xml) now supports multiple Hibernate versions.

A new dropdown box now allows for the selection of the desired Hibernate version.

JBoss Tools and JBoss Developer Studio’s Target Platforms have been updated with the latest Tern.java and AngularJS-Eclipse features to bring the latest improvements and fixes of JavaScript Content Assistant into JBoss Tools.

Check out their New and Noteworthy pages:

Note: These features are available via JBoss Central - Early Access, as a part of AngularJS for Web Tools

JSDT now includes an option to turn off internal parsing and validation, which is useful for users working with big projects where JavaScript is not the main part of development by reducing the memory/performance requirements. This option is also useful when JSDT is used with third-party tools which provide Content Assisting and Validation for JavaScript.

For such projects the "External Builder/Validator" mode can be selected for ECMAScript compliance level preference on the Window→Preferences→JavaScript→Validator preference page:

See: Bug 472754 - Provide a way to turn off any parsing/validation/search indexing by internal JSDT parser

We are pleased to introduce the brand new Bower Tools. Bower is a front-end package manager that fetches and installs frameworks, libraries, and assets. Bower keeps track of these packages in a manifest file named bower.json.

This release includes a slick, new and improved JBoss Central. This is a HTML-based page designed to provide instant access to a large variety of JBoss Developer materials. From top to bottom, you have access to :

The new and improved search feature provides instant access to approximately 200 quickstarts, filtered with zero latency as you type:

Click on a given tag to perform a search using that tag’s label.

We are really proud of how the new JBoss Central page gracefully adapts to lower resolutions, thanks to the Bootstrap framework under the hood. We really hope you’ll appreciate it as well. Please don’t hesitate to provide your feedback.

Some entries in the Software/Update page will now be shown only for the purpose of information. These cannot be installed immediately into JBoss Tools, but may instead represent software that is still being prepared and will be available soon.

We have added http://dcp.jboss.org/ as a search Engine for Eclipse Help search.

Any term you search in the Help > Search window will now be searched through references in all indexed JBoss articles and blogs :

We’ve contributed a new import framework to Eclipse Mars, a.k.a. Smart Import. The purpose of that framework is to automatically detect what is a project and automatically configure it, upon import, with very minimal effort from the user.

For instance, if you open a folder containing a pom.xml file, it will be automatically inferred you’re trying to import a Maven project, so the underlying m2e import mechanism will be invoked.

This new feature is currently still in incubation at Eclipse.org, but we’re including it as a preview, as part of the JBoss Central Experience.

You can go to Import > General > Local folder as Project(s) into Workspace

Curently, the following types of projects are supported, and can be configured automatically on folder import :

Eventually, eGit will be able to leverage this mechanism to automatically import projects after cloning a git repository.

Content Assist for <input list="|"> now refers to the available <datalist> elements. Ctrl+Click on the list ID will navigate to the corresponding <datalist id="…​">

We are happy to introduce our new dynamic content assist for Angular expressions {{expression}} which is based on information collected from AngularJS runtime model via AngularJS API. When the content assist for any {{expression}} is being invoked within any HTML file with some attached controller and there is no any critical errors in the file and required JS files then we run an internal web browser behind the scenes to retrieve all available JS objects.

Note: These features are available via JBoss Central as a part of AngularJS for Web Tools

HTML validation in Eclipse Web Tools had an annoying issue with custom HTML5 tags. It warns about any HTML tag name that is not mentioned in the HTML specification. We contributed a patch to Eclipse Mars which allows to disable those warnings for any particular tag name (or a tag name mask, e.g. <ion-*>).

New spinner widget is available in Ionic Palette:

OpenShift 3 tooling is provided as a TechPreview feature, available from the JBoss Central Software/Updates page. A few features are still missing, like deploying an existing workspace project, or editing existing build configurations. We have some ideas to provide an even better OpenShift Explorer user experience. Once we are fully satisfied with the quality of its feature set, OpenShift 3 tooling will mature to a Supported feature in the upcoming months, and will then be installed by default in JBDS.

it will add an option to create OpenShift 3 connections in the OpenShift Connection wizard.

"OpenShift 3" is not available as an online offering yet. Please refer to the Getting Started documentation

OpenShift 3 tooling supports 2 authentication schemes:

As mentioned in the JBoss Central section, you now have access to over 200 project examples from the JBoss Central page. All these examples and their dependencies can now be cached locally via the Groovy Offline script, available from Preferences > JBoss Tools > Project Examples > Offline Support.

Groovy 2.4.x is now required to execute the offline script.

Please be aware the script now takes several hours to complete (3h on the Red Hat build farm).

New server adapter and runtime types have been created for WildFly 9, 10 and JBoss EAP 7, allowing you to enjoy all the past benefits, but with all the newest runtimes.

Support for Port Monitoring has been (finally) added to JBoss, WildFly, and our enterprise server adapters. With a preference page, a view for tracking recent past requests, integration with the servers view, and some custom enhancements of our own, JBoss Tools is confident that our integration with this WebTools feature is more complete than what’s available with other server adapters.

A blog entry has been posted with further details.

A new feature hiding in the CDT repository of eclipse is being released with Mars. Called the LaunchBar, this feature aims to update the UI of eclipse to allow for more easy running of launch configurations (and other things). In this Beta1 release, we’re adding this feature in an optional addition to our Server Tools. We’ve also written our own extensions to it, integrating the LaunchBar with WTP’s Server Adapters.

The list of launchable objects (center) is linked with your selections in the workspace when used with our extensions, in most cases before you’ve ever even launched the object. The list of targets (on the right) will include all existing server adapters compatible with the launchable.

To enable this feature, you need to install from Help > Install New Software…​ > http://download.jboss.org/jbosstools/mars/development/updates then select the JBoss Tools Server LaunchBar Integration feature.

For more information, you can also check launchbar’s documentation at eclipse.org, or try it for yourself.

We have now verified that WildFly can be run on the newest builds of Java 9 with Jigsaw. This support is only built into our WildFly 10 adapters by default, but users of earlier application servers can remove the -jaxpmodule javax.xml.jaxp-provider portion of the launch arguments to get the same support.

For JBoss 7 and Wildfly installations, using hostnames with an IPv6 format often failed to connect, show webpages, or even verify the server’s state. Several changes have made this work as expected. With updated wildfly jars, management commands will execute without issue. In addition, our tools will now automatically recognize host names in an IPv6 pattern, and update your launch configuration’s various launch arguments to ensure that the server starts properly and with all expected flags set.

In previous releases, Project Archives was designed in such a way that the core plugin would be compiled into multiple jars, one of which had minimal dependencies on Eclipse, allowing it to be used from ant. This usecase was fairly complicated to get working for the user, and involved locating and adding several eclipse jars to the ant classpath, making use of a custom ant task, and adding a significant amount of configuration in your build.xml file to properly map details like a project’s location.

Despite attempting to be portable, persistable, and shareable, this usecase never really lived up to any of those goals. While the eclipse tooling could simply use a project name in its internal metadata, allowing the user to keep those projects wherever they want while using eclipse to resolve their location, the ant usecase required hard-coded location mappings for each project in the build.xml, limiting its usefulness in a shared environment.

For this and several other reasons (including ant’s decreasing utility, and our own internal policies for how plugins should be packaged), this 10-year old use case has been removed.

In Wildfly 8.2, support was added for exploded jar deployment inside exploded wars. This has allowed our tooling to support this use case as well. This new functionality will be very useful when creating a modular web application, with different parts implemented in separate projects. Hot deployment of resources such as Facelets' XHTMLs is crucial for rapid development and testing.

The SWT Browser name and version is now collected for usage statistics to help the JBoss Tools team to learn more about preferred user configurations.

All collected information is reflected in Preferences > JBoss Tools > Usage Reporting for the user’s review.

As always, JBoss Tools does not send any information unless a user has opted into this option, nor is there ever any personal information sent.

On Linux Visual Page Editor can be opened in HTML5 mode for HTML files, where all HTML5 features is supported.

Visual Page editor mode can be changed with dialog, which appears during HTML file openeng or in Visual Page Editor Preferences. using Changing Visual Editor mode requires Eclipse restart.

For single-page applications, the Visual Editor supports navigation between pages. However, there were problems returning to the previous page in the editor. To address this issue, Visual Editor now includes Back and Forward buttons in the menu bar which improve single-page application development.

Content assist for methods in Websocket endpoint classes is now added.

Websocket endpoint classes are classes annotated with javax.websocket.server.ServerEndpoint or javax.websocket.ClientEndpoint. They can have methods annotated with @OnClose, @OnError, @OnMessage, @OnOpen.

Content assist provides the following options:

Each option can only be used once. After being used once, the option does not appear in the choices.

Use Content assist from any position to add a new class member. Use prefixes to reduce the choice list. For example, if onO or @onO is typed and Content Assist is invoked, only onOpen choice will be suggested.

Example of inserted code: