At JBoss Tools we created a java client that allows you to talk to the OpenShift PaaS: openshift-java-client. The library is already used in the OpenShift tooling in JBoss Tools, the Forge plugin and Appcelerators tooling for OpenShift.

This blog post will show you how to use okthis API in your very own java programs. We'll develop a command line tool that displays informations equivalent to what you get when running rhc domain show with the OpenShift command line tools: It displays basic informations about your user.

User Info
=========
Namespace: andre
  RHLogin: andre.dietisheim@redhat.com


Application Info
================
kitchensink
    Framework: jbossas-7
     Creation: 2012-08-10T11:24:13-04:00
         UUID: 8ad0d94f39aa4295a0049de8b8b5ef55
      Git URL: ssh://<SOMEID>@kitchensink-andre.rhcloud.com/~/git/kitchensink.git/
   Public URL: http://kitchensink-andre.rhcloud.com/


 Embedded: 
      jenkins-client-1.4 - Job URL: https://jenk-andre.rhcloud.com/job/kitchensink-build/

You'll find the sourcecode for this example at github: https://github.com/adietish/show-domain-info. All the code that is shown in this blog is contained within the Main class.

If you want to dig futher, you'll get a more complete example that includes jenkins in this wiki article.

Openshift-java-client 2.0

The openshift-java-client is a java library that allows java programs to talk to the OpenShift PaaS. It talks to the new OpenShift RESTful service and allows users to create, modify and destroy OpenShift resources: domains, applications, cartridges, etc.It is hosted on github at https://github.com/openshift/openshift-java-client and is available under the Ecilpse Public License.

Note:

Openshift-java-client 1.x was talking to the legacy service in OpenShift. 2.0 switched to the new RESTful service.

The legacy service is not maintained any more and will fade away at some point. Users of the 1.x client should migrate to the 2.0 client.

The migration should be pretty much without hassles. Even though 2.0 is a complete rewrite, the API stayed pretty much the same/very close.

Requirements

• You need an account on OpenShift. (If you have no account yet, you'd have to signup first)
• Make sure you have an OpenShift domain and some applications (to get some meaningful output)

Launch Parameters

To keep the implemenation simple, the program we're about to write, only accept 2 parameters on the command line:

1. username
2. password

Launching the program with maven would look like this:

mvn test -Dusername=<username> -Dpassword=<password>

Project Setup

We have to make sure that we have the openshift-java-client available on our classpath. The client library is available at https://github.com/openshift/openshift-java-client. You could clone the repo and build your own jar by telling maven to "mvn clean package". But even simpler is to add it as dependency to your pom, since the client library is available from central as maven artifact:

<dependency>
          <groupId>com.openshift</groupId>
          <artifactId>openshift-java-client</artifactId>
          <version>2.0.0</version>
</dependency>

Connect to OpenShift

After we did some basic command line parameter parsing (that we skipped here on puropose) we'd have to get in touch with the OpenShift PaaS. Using the openshift-java-client you'd tell the OpenShiftConnectionFactory to create a connection for you. To create this connection you'll have to provide some parameters:

Server url

First of all you need to give it the url of the OpenShift PaaS. You may either hard code it or ask the OpenShift configuration for it:

new OpenShiftConfiguration().getLibraServer()

The OpenShiftConfiguration class parses the OpenShift configuration files you may have on your machine (~/.openshift/express.conf, C:/Documents and Settings/user/.openshift/express.conf etc.). Those usually get created once you installed the rhc command line tools. In case you dont have any configuration yet, OpenShiftConfiguration holds some meaningful defaults and points to http://openshift.redhat.com. On the other hand, our configuration class also allows you to override settings by putting them to the system configuration as you would do if you want to switch to the OpenShift liveCD temporarly. You would then simply add the following to the command line when launching the java virtual machine:

-Dlibra_server=127.0.0.1

Client id

The connection factory also requires you to provide your very own client id. This client id is used when the openshift-java-client talks to the OpenShift REST service. It'll get included in the user-agent string that tells OpenShift what client it is talking to. We use the name of our example, "show-domain-info".

Username and Password

Last but not least, you also have to give it your OpenShift credentials, the ones we got from the command-line.

String openshiftServer = new OpenShiftConfiguration().getLibraServer();
IOpenShiftConnection connection = new OpenShiftConnectionFactory().getConnection("show-domain-info", "myuser", "mypassword", openshiftServer);

Once you have your connection you can get a IUser instance which will allow you to create your domain and applications:

IUser user = connection.getUser();

Print the User Infos

The first information block involves basic user informations. The username is available from your IUser instance:

System.out.println("RHLogin:\t" + user.getRhlogin());

The other value that we want to display, the domain namespace, is accessible from your OpenShift IDomain. We'll get it from the the user instance and print its id (namespace).

IDomain domain = user.getDefaultDomain();
System.out.println("Namespace:\t" + domain.getId());

Print the Application Infos

The second portion printed by "rhc domain show" is reporting your users applications. All OpenShift applications are held in a list within your domain. We simply get the list and iterate over it's entries:

for (IApplication application : domain.getApplications()) {

The required values - name, framework, creation time etc. - are now available within each IApplication instance:

System.out.println(application.getName());
System.out.println("\tFramework:\t" + application.getCartridge().getName());
System.out.println("\tCreation:\t" + application.getCreationTime());
System.out.println("\tUUID:\t\t" + application.getUUID());
System.out.println("\tGit URL:\t" + application.getGitUrl());
System.out.println("\tPublic URL:\t" + application.getApplicationUrl() + "\n");

An application may have several cartridges embedded (MySql, Postgres, Jenkins etc.). These cartridges are reported by by the application. We get the list of cartridges and inspect at each of them:

for(IEmbeddedCartridge cartridge : application.getEmbeddedCartridges()) {

We then want to know bout a cartridge's (IEmbeddedCartridge), name and url:

System.out.println("\t" + cartridge.getName() + " - URL:" + cartridge.getUrl());

That is it - you now have an app that can talk to OpenShift via its REST API. If you want to do more we also have this article that shows how to perform actual operations against your OpenShift applications. Hope you enjoy it and let us know what you build with it!

Almost two years ago we started including an opt-in ping-back functionallity to JBoss Tools and Developer Studio installations. The ping-back has in that time given us a lot of good and sometimes surprising information about our users.

In this blogpost I want to give you the highlights of these observations.

Disclaimer

Before I start I must underline that we do not track any individuals data and it is all opt-in, i.e. users need to explicitly say “Yes - please send pings” for us to pick up data.

The data below is not for all users of our tools, it is only for those who have said yes to participate - but with the amount of pings we do get (currently 28K/day, 6+ million/year) I believe it is a signficant high part of our user base to at least give an idea about the trends and divisions of our user base.

I’ve tried my best to validate and ensure I report correct findings - please leave a comment if you believe I’ve made an error or there is some other metric you would like to know about.

And finally - the content, observations and conclusions in this blog are my personal views based on my intepretation of the analytics data I have access to.

Methodology

The way our ping-back works from a highlevel is that on startup of an Eclipse instance a HTTP GET is made to Google Analytics and here the data is collected as if it was a web page hit (i.e. Google Analytics gathers information from the network connection, HTTP headers and URL parameters).

We only make maximum one ping every 24-hour per Eclipse Instance and it is only on startups. Thus if you have your eclipse instance running for six days, you only make one ping in those six days.

I’ve used Google Analytics web UI and data extraction features as a basis for the findings below.

Operating Systems

If you should be in doubt, Microsoft Windows is by far the most dominant desktop OS out there when it comes to desktop OS, and this is no different for users of JBoss Tools.

Here is Operating Systems for June-July 2012:

Even if you separate out Windows XP on its own then Windows XP users outnumber Linux + OSX users combined.

Operating Systems for June-July 2012 with XP separated out.

I saw these same splits in our usage tracking (Windows: ~80%, Linux: ~15% OSX: ~5%) and I was worried we were having some bug in our ping-back code.

I therefore got access to Google Analytics for several of our jboss.org project sites including all of community.jboss.org and here the splits are more or less the same no matter how you slice and dice it. Thus either this split is true or Google Analytics is wrong everywhere.

What surprises me though is that Windows is even growing over time, both on site visits and JBoss Tools ping back:

I’m sure the growth of Windows here does not resemble the growth of operating systems world wide, I believe it is more a function of more and more “real world” industrial users picking up and using JBoss technology.

I know it surprises alot of people both inside and outside of my current employer (Red Hat) who would like to think Linux is not just primarily a server side OS anymore; and I know of a lot of conference attendees who claims OSX is “everywhere”. It might be everywhere at conferences, but not out there in the “real world”.

Linux Distributions

Once you get pass the fact Windows is by far the biggest desktop platform then it is interesting to look at how the various Linux distributions spread out.

The following charts shows a summary of Linux distributions as detected by our ping-back code to detect Linux distributions.

Our ping-back report back the distribution name and version as found in various distribution specific files and I’ve taken these reports and stripped out the versions and just looked at the distribution name.

I unfortunately do not have any way of confirming the validity of these numbers because Google Analytics does not report this level of detail for specific websites and looking at distrowatch.com the numbers are very different. Probably the difference should be explained in difference of Desktop vs. Server, Linux users vs. JBoss/Middleware users.

In any case please do take these uncertainties into account when considering these numbers.

The graphs below is for the period June-July 2012:

Countries

One of my favorite images from Google Analytics is the map showing city activity across the world.

City Activity 2011-2012 ( a full year )

That is showing JBoss Tools being used across 6 continents, 177 countries in 9644 cities; and as you can see it is not United states nor Europe that is lighting up the most.

Most active cities are in areas such as Brazil, China and India, which also is revealed in the Top 10 countries list for 2011-2012.

I apparently need to learn to write blogs in Portuguese and Mandrin!

I was asked how the Operating System varies across countries and that was a bit trickier to extract because Google Analytics starts sampling when the dataset gets too big - but here is a table showing OS per Top 10 countries based on 80% of data collected in June 2012.

It’s interesting to see United States OS X usage be almost twice as high as any other country and countries like China and South Korea having ~98% usage of Windows.

Where as countries like Brazil has a much higher percentage using Linux.

Users from Spain and Italy have same Linux usage but Italy has twice as many Mac users.

Screen resolution

In the last year, we’ve seen no less than 7995 different screen resolutions.

The number was much higher than I expected, and I believe this is caused by differences in how Java/SWT differs across various OS releases on how the desktop resolution is reported; thus the Top 10 screen resolutions is a rough estimation.

What is interesting though is that the number of observed 1366x768 screen resolutions have grown much more than other screen resolutions.

It’s as if everyone started to get more and more HD laptops/displays the last couple of months.

One thing I did notice was that there is a few (or just one?) user that has some very large multi-screen setups. Tried to visualize this by showing smallest (640x480), most common (1366x768) and largest observed screen resolution (11520x2400) relatively to each other in this diagram:

The large resolutions are probably multiple monitors, not just one single monitor. My guess is the largest reported is a couple of WQUXGA screens. think I got screen envy!

Java version

Java 7 was released “recently” and I got more than a few request asking why we still support Java 6 when it is EOL and Java 7 is the new kid in town.

The answer is in the following graph. It shows the uptake of the most popular Java versions over the last year.

You can see Java 1.6.0_26 overtake 1.6.0_24 in July 2011 and similar 1.6.0_29 takeover in November 2011 and finally 1.6.0_31 is the current big winner.

Java 1.7 had only little uptake, and its only recently Java 7 is above 20% usage.

The current %’s shows a clear 76% usage of 1.6, following with Java 1.7 with 22% and then a few (2%) is still using Java 1.5 - we, even had a few Java 1.8 users but they are still below 0.01% thus not visible on any of the graphs.

I expect over the next year Java 1.7 will have a bigger uptake, but I would not bet on it overtaking Java 1.6 anytime soon.

Conclusions

One nice thing to conclude from our usage tracking is that we can see that JBoss Tools keeps growing and has more and more uptake and I’m personally very happy to see that.

Beyond that my primary lesson from the gathering of analytics is that Windows XP is bigger than Linux and OS X combined. Windows overall is where the majority of real-world users are.

There are probably also lot of interesting political and world-economic comments that can be made about the Top 10 countries usage of Operating Systems. But this is just JBoss Tools users, thus not sure how this maps to the world-arena but one thing I do think we can conclude is - each country has very different composition of users/demographics; but they all primarily uses Windows.

Therefore if you are doing any work on tools, frameworks or applications that relate to JBoss user/developer, please remember to test it on Windows, including Windows XP no matter how much you hate this OS your users are using your applicaiton/frameworks to make their own life easier.

Before anyone put words in my mouth any say this means Linux and OS X users should be ignored because they are such a small percentage - that is not true since the uptake of Windows over time shows that Linux/OSX is where a good portion of the “early adopters” are.

That is it for this time, let me know what you think - does this match your expectations ? Could we improve the dataset/statistics somehow ?

Have fun,

Max

I'm extremely proud to be able to announce that both JBoss Tools 3.3 and Developer Studio 5.0 final releases are now available.

Final GA

Developer Studio: [Download] | Tools: [Download] [Update Site] | [What's New] [Forums] [JIRA] [Twitter]

JBoss Tools is a set of plugins for Eclipse that complements, enhances and goes beyond the support that exists for JBoss and related technologies in the default Eclipse distribution.

JBoss Developer Studio is a fully bundled Eclipse distribution which not only includes the majority of JBoss Tools but also all its needed dependencies and 3rd party plugins allowing for an easy one-click and no-fuss installation.

If you are into doing your own bleeding edge eclipse plugin assembly, JBoss Tools is for you; if you are more into having something that "Just Works" then JBoss Developer Studio is the way to go.

Installation

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

java -jar jbdevstudio-<installername>.jar

Note: if you are on Windows or Mac OSX 64-bit we recommend you ensure to select the 32-bit option in the multi-platform installer to get Visual Page editor working and use much less memory.

JBoss Tools requires a bit more:

This release requires at least Eclipse 3.7.2 but we recommend using the Eclipse 3.7.2 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 (Indigo)" or use our update site directly.

The update site URL to use from Help > Install New Software... is:

http://download.jboss.org/jbosstools/updates/stable/indigo/

Please note that the URL above is for the stable releases, if you use the development update site (http://download.jboss.org/jbosstools/updates/development/indigo/) that will work too. Only difference is that the development site will contain beta/CR releases too.

Note: SOA tooling for BPEL, Drools, Guvnor, jBPM, ESB, Modeshape, pi4soa, Savara, SwitchYard & Teiid are no longer included in the JBoss Tools release. They will become available separately later.

A Year of Features

The amount of features and new improvements in this final is awesome - here is a little overview:

Slim & Fast Universal Installer

The installer for JBoss Developer Studio is now a multiplatform installer. Allows you to just download one installer no matter what OS you are running. And the installer is smaller and faster to download and run than previous versions.

JBoss Central

We wanted to make it easy for new users to get started with JBoss technology and for existing users have a place to get more information and keep uptodate on what is happening in the JBoss Community. That place is called JBoss Central.

Central shows up at startup (you can disable it if you want) but is also available with a quick click in the toolbar. Besides having blogs, news and documentation links it also serves as a way to start one of the six project wizards

which help you get started with JBoss technology such as CDI, Richfaces, Errai/GWT, Spring on AS etc.

Central also has a second tab called "Software/Update" where you can easily install tested and verified plugins to work with JBoss Tools and within Developer Studio.

New Server Adapters

We've extended our support for JBoss servers to include JBoss Enterprise Platform 6, JBoss AS 7.

We continue to also work with the previous versions of application servers making it possible to develop, run and debug both new and older applications.

There is also an OpenShift server adapter to integrate with Red Hat OpenShift PaaS, more on that later.

We also continue to have the Deploy Only server which allows you to use our incremental and flexible server adapter features together with any server that supports hot deployment.

Furthermore all of these server adapters support remote deployment via any filesystem protocols supported by Eclipse Remote System deployment such as SSH or FTP.

One of the new features in this area is that servers now no longer need to be started by the tools, if a server is already detected as running or you have enable "Server is externally managed" then

JBoss Tools server adapters will just connect to it and do its deployments as configured - allowing you to work with the tools in  many different environments.

Maven

One of the big new additions is the full support and integration of m2e for users of Maven projects. We did not just include m2e, we went ahead and improved on it and added better support for the frameworks and features of Maven we found to be useful.

We have a lot of Maven improvements.

• Maven Profile Selection - dialog to quickly enable/disable profiles on your Maven projects ( especially useful to switch between Arquillian server profiles )
• Endorsed Libraries Classpath Container - if your Maven project uses endorsed libraries we setup a matching classpath that gets priority over the JDK classpath.
• Tons of framework configurators - we enable the matching tooling in eclipse if your Maven project uses one of the following frameworks:
  • Hibernate/JPA
  • JSF
  • CDI
  • JAX-RS
  • Seam
  • Portlets.
• Configure repositories in settings.xml - "Configure Maven Repositories" allows you to easily add and remove repositories from your Maven settings.xml; available as a quickfix on missing dependencies error markers.
• Materialize Library - Allows you to copy all the jars found in a Maven classpath container into a directory. Great if you have a Maven example but would rather use it with pure Eclipse or some other build system.
• Automatic Source Lookup for Server runtimes based on Maven metadata - point Source lookup to your server directory with jars and it will locate the matching source based on maven metadata; can be enable to be automatically done for JBoss runtimes.

And then of course m2e-wtp, the feature that configures Eclipse Web Tools based of your pom.xml had a lot of features improved and added. The m2e-wtp also is moving to eclipse.org to be part of future Eclipse release trains.

Furthermore we've released m2e configurators to m2e marketplace to improve configuration of Annotation Processing, wro4j - javascript optimization and finally supporting projects that configure eclipse JDT as their compiler.

All in all, if you want to use Maven with Eclipse, JBoss Tools makes your life easier!

OpenShift

OpenShift also came around during the last year. OpenShift is a PaaS with a free offering that includes support for running applications written in Java, Ruby, Node.js, Python, PHP, Perl and more.

The great thing about OpenShift is that you can easily get up and running with just a webbrowser, git and SSH while using command line tools - very simple and powerful.

We wanted to bring this simplicity and power to the users of Eclipse and that is what our OpenShift Tooling does.

When you have an account at OpenShift you can easily browse, create and manipulate your OpenShift applications and cartridges. OpenShift supports PHP, Perl, Python, Node.js, Java and if that is not enough you can use the Do-It-Yourself cartridge. You can easily open a webbrowser showing your application, monitor remote log files, inspect environment setup and start Port Forwarding allowing for remote debugging and remote browsing of databases and Jenkins instances.

The OpenShift tools is all compatible with the command line tooling but also completely independent of it allowing you to start with the tools that fit your needs first and then mix and match as you see fit.

For the release we've create a "Getting started with OpenShift" video:

Forge

If you like Forge you will like JBoss Tools for its Forge Console which let you to use Forge in context of Eclipse and have them coexist and interact. The console will open and show the files/projects you edit/create in Forge and the console can also let Forge track the selection you have in Eclipse.

Browser Simulator

BrowserSim can be started with one-click from the IDE, showing instantly the selected file or URL in a mobile browser simulator. The simulator has skins and layout dimensions for a range of pouplar mobile and tablet devices. You can rotate the device to see how your application looks and how it is reacting to such size and layout changes.

Hibernate

Hibernate Tools now supports multiple versions of Hibernate - you can now use it together with Hibernate 3.3-3.5, 3.6 and 4.0/4.1.

JAX-RS

If your application uses JAX-RS annotations there is now a node in the project explorer that allows you to easily navigate to your various Rest endpoints. The JAX-RS tooling will also validate your annotations (mismatched names etc.) and provides code completion.

The JAX-RS integration allow to easily "run" your endpoints by making sure the server is running and then opening the URL in the Webservice Tester for further investigation/testing.

And More...

Seam 2.3.x support, CDI tooling have great improvements, incl. support for DeltaSpike, the visual page editor is faster than ever, bugfixes, overall awesomeness and the list goes on.

You can see the full list of new and noteworthy on the New and Noteworthy page

Does it Juno ?

Since the first version of Eclipse Juno is arriving soon it is worth mentioning that JBoss Tools from its updatesite can be installed on top of Juno.

It is though not guaranteed everything works, we know that especially Hibernate Dali/JPT integration have issues since here the API has changed greatly.

But if you are a Juno early-adopter then do please try run JBoss Tools on it and if you find issues let us know in the forum or on JIRA.

Then we will use the input for the next revision of JBoss Tools which will start shortly.

Hope you like it, and remember:

Have fun,

Max

Beta3 of JBoss Tools and Developer Studio is now available with a good set of bugfixes but also a good set of new improvements and features in the area of OpenShift, Maven, BrowerSim, GWT, Annotation Processing and it even now come with easy installable source features for easy debugging and hacking. 

Beta3

Developer Studio: [Download] | Tools: [Download] [Update Site] | [What's New] [Forums] [JIRA] [Twitter]

JBoss Tools is a set of plugins for Eclipse that complements, enhances and goes beyond the support that exist for JBoss and related technologies in the default Eclipse distribution.

JBoss Developer Studio is a fully bundled Eclipse distribution which not only includes majority of JBoss Tools but also all its needed dependencies and 3rd party plugins allowing for an easy one-click and no-fuzz installation.

If you are into doing your own bleeding edge eclipse plugin assembly, JBoss tools is for you, if you are more into having something that "Just Works" then JBoss Developer Studio is the way to go.

Installation

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

java -jar jbdevstudio-<installername>.jar

Note, if you are on Mac OSX 64-bit we recommend you ensure to select the 32-bit option in the multi-platform installer to get Visual Page editor working and use much less memory.

Similar if you are on Windows 64-bit then use a 32-bit JDK to get 32-bit version running.

JBoss Tools requires a bit more:

This release requires at least Eclipse 3.7.1 but we recommend using the Eclipse 3.7.2 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 (Indigo)" or use our update site directly.

The update site URL to use from Help > Install New Software... is:

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

Note: SOA tooling such as Drools, jbpm, ESB, Teeid etc. are not included in the JBoss Tools core releases at this time - they will be available separately.

OpenShift

The OpenShift platform is moving and improving all the time and this also shows in the OpenShift tooling included in JBoss Tools.

The most prominent and waited for feature in this release is we now support starting port forwarding from the IDE instead of using the command line.

And we've done it so it is even better and more powerful than the command line in a couple of situations:

• it works on all platforms out of the box
• it allows you to choose between using 127.0.0.1 or the remote addresses (especially good for Mac and Windows which needs configuration using 127.0.0.x)
• it will find free ports if necessary avoiding you to have to stop your local running servers to connect to OpenShift

To start/stop this you use the context menu of your OpenShift application in OpenShift Explorer (previously named OpenShift Console).

OpenShift Tools further more now allows you to put any existing application onto OpenShift where it previously only allowed Eclipse WTP projects. These projects can now even be multi-module Maven projects if you want to. This feature should be used with care since it overwrites your OpenShift application and your project content might not be working out of the box on OpenShift - thus use with care and if it fails

remember that OpenShift uses Git for it storage so you can roll it back in case of a failure.

And finally OpenShift tools also allows you to create scalable applications in the UI now.

Annotation Processing w/Maven

Java EE 6 really started pushing more and more annotation processors and Eclipse APT provides a nice incremental integreation with this in Eclipse that makes it fast and non-invasive.

Unfortunately in context of Maven this have not always been easy to get configured since there exists multiple ways to invoke the Annotation Processor and in some cases Eclipse APT single-folder-output gives problems

With this release of JBoss Tools we are also releasing a configurator for m2e which combines all the best plugins concerning Annotation Processing and made something better and more integrated.

Fred Bricon have written a full blog about the feature set and how it works - if you use Annotation processing and maven I recommend you read it.

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) w/Maven

In our previous releases we have struggled with getting GWT examples to load into Eclipse without users having to tweak and manually run certain actions in specific sequence. The reason for this all came down to that there did not exist a m2e Configurator which takes the maven compiler plugin settings and apply them to Google's Eclipse plugin properly. With JBoss Tools Beta 3 that now exists and it just works.

Without this loaded you would have to manually add the GWT module xml to Eclipse and then perform a build based on that which would generate to possibly different output directories than your Maven project is configured to. With JBoss Tools for Maven loaded this a problem of the past.

Mobile Browser Simulator Skins

BrowserSim now has support for View Source, roatation of the screen by clicking in the corners and two new skins:

...and finally as a team enjoying the wonders of Open Source we've added two things that could not exist without the source(s) being open:

JBoss Source Lookup

We've included the JBoss Source Lookup container which Snjezana have been working on that will scan a directory of jar's and use their Maven metadata and if necessary their MD5 checksum to locate the source code for any Launch configuration not just your Maven projects and Maven classpath provider.

This is useful when you have a server like JBoss, Tomcat, Glassfish or any other server or framework which jar's are mostly available in Maven repositories together with their source artifacts.

This allow you to fully debug your runtimes without having to pollute your classpath or Eclipse project configuration with runtime details, machine specific locations and manual download of the sources.

The feature must be explicitly enabled, thus be sure to read Snjezana's wiki article outlining how to use this.

Eclipse Source Features

If you are into Eclipse plugin development and want to tinker with the source of JBoss Tools our updatesite now include a matching source feature for majority of our plugins under the Source category on the updatesite. This allows debugging and editing of JBoss Tools plugin without having to checkout our full SVN source tree. Contributions very welcome

...and more

As usual screenshots and more explanation of what is new is available from the What's New site!

Let us know what you think - and do know that we are codefreezing for CR1/GA any day now, so do let us know if you find big issues or simply just love it - both things is what keeps us going

Have fun,

Max

This morning I woke up to an email stating that Christos Vasilakis had created an iPhone app to manage JBoss AS 7 servers from your phone, he even posted a video about it.

I tried it out immediatly and wanted to see how to use it against servers started by JBoss Tools. Since JBoss AS 7 is secured by default you have to do a few steps to make this work:

1. Add a user to your JBoss Server with $JBOSS_HOME/bin/add-user.sh
2. Set "Host name" to your local ip instead of localhost
3. Add -Djboss.bind.address.management=<local ip> to the server launch configuration.

Note: These steps are not unique for the iPhone app, it's the exact same you would need to do for any remote management of your JBoss Tools started server.

To show how it all works together I recorded a screencast which shows the setup in tools and how to use the iPhone app.

If the video is not showing up for you then you can watch it directly on JBoss Tools vimeo group.

Thanks to Christos for making the app and hope you all enjoy managing your JBoss Tools started AS 7 server from your couch

Over the last 2+ years we have done a lot of work at helping improving Maven Integration for Eclipse (m2e) in areas of performance, features and extensions.

One of those extensions, if not the most important one, is maintaining and developing Maven Integration for Web Tools Platform also called m2e-wtp.

Today (or rather last night) our proposal for making this an Eclipse.org project got posted.

What is m2e-wtp

m2e-wtp is what helps you get seamless import of your maven projects with all the right dependencies configured, the proper assembly setup and it will even enable features in Eclipse that are relevant based on your maven pom.xml file, in context of the Web Tools Platform features : automatic configuration for Web, EJB, EAR, Connector, Web Fragment and Application Client projects.

m2e-wtp also brings some maven exclusive features to your favorite IDE, such as dynamic web resource filtering or war overlays.

You can get the current m2e-wtp from Eclipse Marketplace or by installing JBoss Tools.

Why bring m2e-wtp to Eclipse

m2e-wtp have had a “fun” life over the years. After m2e moved to Eclipse, m2e-wtp was in a weird place seeing that Sonatype hosted the issue tracker and the main source repository at github while JBoss eventually took over the development and maintenance, but the core m2e was at Eclipse.

This spread between multiple organizations have made it harder than necessary for potential contributors to get involved and it also made it tricky for users to know where and how to get involved and get help.

To remedy this, we’ve worked over the last couple of weeks/months to prepare a proposal to move m2e-wtp and this proposal is now what is available on Eclipse.org.

What does this mean for JBoss Tools users

It should not have any big impact to start - we plan on making the migration from the original m2e-wtp to m2e-wtp at Eclipse as smooth as possible.

We will continue to drive and contribute to m2e-wtp, and JBoss Tools will still provide extensions and integration on top of m2e and m2e-wtp.

Some of these extensions don’t make sense elsewhere than in context of JBoss Tools and others will eventually find their way into m2e and m2e-wtp.

How do I support/contribute to this proposal ?

If you are interested in this project and seeing it become a full eclipse project, please comment on it on Eclipse Proposal forum, email me directly at max.andersen@redhat.com or catch me at EclipseCon this week!

We would love to hear your thoughts on this, even if it is just a “that is about freaking time” comment

Great thanks go to all the people from Sonatype, IBM, Oracle, SAP, VMWare and others involved in making this proposal happen - to know more about them and the proposal, read more here.

In conclusion I would like to thank Fred Bricon for his outstanding work on m2e-wtp and I’m looking forward to see where he will take it going forward hosted at eclipse.org.

Thank you and have fun!

In celebration that @dhinojosa became our chiliad follower on @jbosstools we are releasing Beta1 of both JBoss Tools and JBoss Developer Studio today!

Beta1 (Chiliad)

Developer Studio: [Download] | Tools: [Download] [Update Site] | [What's New] [Forums] [JIRA] [Twitter]

JBoss Tools is a set of plugins for Eclipse that complements, enhances and goes beyond the support that exist for JBoss and related technologies in the default Eclipse distribution.

JBoss Developer Studio is a fully bundled Eclipse distribution which not only includes majority of JBoss Tools but also all its needed dependencies and 3rd party plugins allowing for an easy one-click installation and no-fuzz installation.

If you are into doing your own bleeding edge eclipse plugin assembly, JBoss tools is for you, if you are more into having something that "Just Works" then JBoss Developer Studio is the way to go.

Installation

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

java -jar jbdevstudio-<installername>.jar

Note, if you are on Mac OSX 64-bit we recommend you start it with -d32 to enable 32-bit to allow you to get the Visual Page editor and use a lot less memory.

java -d32 -jar jbdevstudio-<installername>.jar

Similar if you are on Windows 64-bit then use a 32-bit JDK to get 32-bit version running.

JBoss Tools requires a bit more:

This release requires at least Eclipse 3.7.1 but we recommend using the Eclipse 3.7.2 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 (Indigo)" or use our update site directly.

The update site URL to use from Help > Install New Software... is:

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

Note: SOA tooling such as Drools, jbpm, ESB, Teeid etc. are not included in this release - they will be available separately.

Below is my favorite features this time around from our long list of fixes and feature improvements for this Beta.

Control JBoss Hot-redeployment

JBoss server adapter normally lets the JBoss Server or Eclipse JDT figure out when it is time to load newly deployed content or update class files via the debugger, but in some cases it is nice being able to say you would like a restart of your application when certain file changes.

We do it automatically for updates to jar files, but you might want it to be more agressive and even do it on individual class file changes or when you update .jsp's or similar files.

If you enable the "Customize application reload behavior on changes to project resources" you now can enter a regular expression to match which resources it should trigger a reload of the module on.

Here are some examples:

Cheatsheet for regular expression syntax used above: \. matches a . (dot), $ means end of line, | means 'or' allowing to group content.

This of course means more often redeploys but that can very often be just the thing you need for your specific workflow.

Skinned and Intelligent BrowserSim

The mobile browser simulator now looks like a mobile browser and will now try intelligently to detect which URL to open with based on what is the current selection/editor in Eclipse.

Redesigned OpenShift UI

To handle more complex scenarios such as supporting deploying openshift applications already associated with another git repo and to make OpenShift easier to get started with we have redesigned the OpenShift wizards and views.

OpenShift Express Console

We've added view called OpenShift Express Console which gives you a nice overview of your OpenShift account(s), your applications/cartridges and provides easy access to common operations.

OpenShift Source and binary deployment

It is now possible to drag existing deployable resources such as WTP projects and resources marked as deployable to the OpenShift server and if the resource is part of the related github project it will just be associated with the server, but if the resource is not part of the OpenShift project then it will be placed inside the /deployments folder of the project as a binary.

Once you publish to OpenShift the binary deployments will be deployed together with your source project which will be built by OpenShift.

Updated JBoss Central content

JBoss Central now refreshed all the main wizards for JavaEE, Richfaces, html5.

Richfaces shows up recent Richfaces 4 release and HTML 5 is showing of the work done in the Aerogear project regarding mobile application development.

We are also now featuring GWT Web project which has Errai in it showing of their event bus to communicate between multiple browsers.

Note, that Google Eclipse plugins are not installed by default - it will be offered when you click the GWT web project.

EAP 6 Enterprise Maven Repository

All of the examples above works with the upcoming EAP 6 release which includes a Enterprise Maven repository.

To enable this target an EAP 6 server adapter or set the "enterprise" flag in the wizard to true.

From this the project will generate projects that uses the proper enterprise supported binaries over the community binaries.

Faster Import

We found and fixed a memory and CPU issue that caused import of bigger projects to be slow and in some cases even stall.

With this issue fixed projects import much faster even for our small test projects it wins 4 seconds and for larger projects it should be even bigger gains.

As always let us know if you see slowness that seems unwarranted and we will love to help trace it down and fix the problems.

Seam 2.3

Seam tooling now accepts and work with Seam 2.3. Seam 2.3 is still in development but it will eventually allow deploying Seam 2 applications on JBoss 7 and Enterprise Application Platform 6.

Forge

The Forge tooling now bundles Forge 1.0.0.Final and adds a good set of usability features.

Link with editor makes any file opened in the current editor be picked up by Forge - meaning you don't have to manually type the resource location into Forge. Forge will already be there.

"cd" and "pick-up" support, is kind of the opposite, here things you do in Forge gets Eclipse to open/select the used resources.

Maven + JPA

Maven now detects if your project is using JPA and enables JPA/Dali/Hibernate tooling support on your project.

JAX-RS + Webservice Tester

The JAX-RS REST Web Services node in Project Explorer now supports "Run As..."-style launching of the Webservice tester.

Meaning you can right click on a URL path under JAX-RS and run as on your server and it will if, necessary deploy the application, start the server and then open the web services tester

with the selected URL and give you easy acces to test and explore the returned output.

..and more

The above are just a fraction of the 750+ issues we have fixed this time around - you can see more highlights and screenshots here, but I encourage you to try out this Beta of JBoss Tools or Developer Studio instead of just taking my word for it  - and let us know in the comments or forum what you think about it!

Have fun,

Max

I’m posting about three features which I have had a personal interest in making it into AS 7.1 and the upcoming JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) 6.

Today the topic is how AS 7 is secured but still stays developer friendly by default.

Developer Friendly Security

Security is one of those things you know is important but also knows it risk ending up making your and your user life miserable to get started with your product.

One of the big challenges AS have had over the years is that while it tried to be developer friendly out of the box by not being secured by default, developers forgot or simply did not know how to actually ensure the server was secured for proper production deployments.

This previous default out of the box behavior have led to several security issues for AS. Which if you are using an older AS version in production should go and verify you are not unknowingly exposed to.

All of these security defaults was mostly fixed by using EAP which is secured by default, but then as sideeffect needed additional configuration to be usable for development.

In AS 7.1 things are different. Here the server is now by default not exposed on external interfaces and there are simply no users registered that can login remotely.

But does this mean you now have to go and add a user before being able to use the server ? Do you have to configure the examples to use this new user and type in a password for doing deployments ?

No - you don’t have to! AS 7.1 has this great trick that when you connect to the management services the server will send a “secret key” challenge to the client which it can only answer if it has physical direct access to the filesystem with the same permissions as the user that is running the server.

This means that if you as a developer run AS 7.1 and want to do some local management operations on it you do not have to setup any users nor configure your examples or tools to use the server - it will just work out of the box in the development scenario and if you go and deploy the server into production “as-is” it will not be exposing any internals unless. Big win for security and for developer usability!

Setting up a user

There are though one case where you have to setup an user as a developer. To access the web-based admin console (http://localhost:8080/console) you are using a browser and this goes on over HTTP within a browser which cannot (safely and portable) get access to the local secret key AS 7.1 generates.

Luckily adding a user is easy todo and if you try and access the web console AS 7 will even tell you how to do it, but let me repeat it here for completeness.

To add a auser you go into your AS 7 installation and run bin/add-user.sh. For the default case you can accept the default choices by pressing enter twice and just enter username/password and verify the username is correct.

It should look something like this:

$ cd jboss-as-7.1.0.Final
$ bin/add-user.sh

What type of user do you wish to add? 
a) Management User (mgmt-users.properties) 
b) Application User (application-users.properties)
(a): 

Enter the details of the new user to add.
Realm (ManagementRealm) : 

Enter the details of the new user to add.
Realm (ManagementRealm) : 
Username : max
Password : ******
Re-enter Password : ***** 
About to add user 'max' for realm 'ManagementRealm'
Is this correct yes/no? yes
Added user 'max' to file '/Users/max/runtimes/jboss-as-7.1.0.Final/standalone/configuration/mgmt-users.properties'
Added user 'max' to file '/Users/max/runtimes/jboss-as-7.1.0.Final/domain/configuration/mgmt-users.properties'

The two lines reveals what this add-user.sh actually does: update the mgmt-users.properties files found in the standalone and domain mode configuration.

If you wanted to you could update these property files manually since it is just pairs of username and a hashed password - but using bin/add-user.sh is by far the simplest approach.

Now with this user added the remote running tools can connect to AS 7 as long as they provide the username and password.

JBoss Tools and Security

By default JBoss Tools server adapter will use the local secret key generated by AS 7.1, but in case you are running remotely you will need to tell JBoss Tools which username and password to use.

This is done by double-clicking the server in the server view which will open the server editor. In here there is a “Management Login Credentials” section.

Now if AS 7.1 requires a username/password JBoss Tools will be able to login to the server remotely to perform management operations.

Tomorrow

Tomorrow the topic is on how AS 7.1 comes with a large set of Quickstarts which runs out-of-the-box from command line, JBoss Tools or your second-favorite IDE.