Today we are releasing JBoss Tools 3 Alpha1!

[Download] [Update Site] [What's'New] [Documentation (Nightly)] [Forums] [JIRA]

Alpha Warning!

This is an alpha version so do not just throw us away when your computer blows up while using this version, do please tell us what happened! Getting feedback from users are very important for us.

Use the Forums and/or JIRA to provide feedback. Thank you!

Upgrade to Ganymede

This release will only work with Eclipse 3.4/Ganymede.

We recommend you do not use Eclipse.org update site to go from Eclipse 3.3 to Eclipse 3.4 - instead download the full binary from Eclipse. To get the optional TPTP and BIRT integration to show up see the list of Eclipse drivers we used for JBoss Tools 3.x here

If you can only use Eclipse 3.3 use JBoss Tools 2.1.2, but JBoss Tools 2.x will not have any of the new features.

Highlights

There is a lot going on in 3.x, but the following are the new feature highlights:

• Graphical Seam pages.xml editor, visual view and editing of page and exception navigation
• Faster editing in Visual Page Editor and the source tab is back!
• EL Variable substitution, allowing users to specify what a EL variable should be evaluated to; allowing includes and image references in pages that uses EL to be visualized.
• Project archives can use relative paths and Eclipse variables allowing for more portable .packages files
• Dali support for Hibernate, use Hibernate as a JPA platform in Eclipse JPA projects.
• Portlet wizard and facet with support for JSF/Seam via the Portlet Bridge
• JBossWS WTP support, enable usage of JBossWS in WTP web services functionality
• Eclipse BIRT support, we added a Hibernate backed datasource for Eclipse BIRT and experimental Seam/JSF tags for using BIRT charts and reports.

...and more. See the full change list in jira and see more details and screenshots in What's'New

Have fun!

p.s. the JBoss Tools Drink is one of the suggestions we got for a JBoss Tools identity - I'll blog about that later, but if you got other suggestions let us know.

After the release of Hibernate Core 3.3.0.GA last week, we are releasing aligned versions of its sister projects. These releases are primarily ensuring that everything works property on Core 3.3. They also improved a few other things:

• use of slf4j as the logging facade eliminating classloader headaches
• all projects are now deployed in the JBoss Maven repository under org/hibernate with their proper pom.xml files. Hopefully, the dark ages of Hibernate dependencies for Maven are behind us (we are still looking at pushing the JBoss repository changes to the central Maven one but it takes longer than expected: check the Hibernate development mailing list for more info)
• the build system is more modular and lets you work on each project independently making contributions much easier
• the regular set of bug fixes (check the change logs for more details)

The following releases are now available:

• Hibernate Annotations 3.4.0.GA (changelog)
• Hibernate EntityManager 3.4.0.GA (changelog)
• Hibernate Commons Annotations 3.1.0.GA (changelog)
• Hibernate Validator 3.1.0.CR2 * (changelog)

* A small glitch slipped through when we released Hibernate Core. Be sure to use Hibernate Validator 3.1.0.CR2 or above when using Core 3.3. We wanted to take our time fixing this, Validator CR2 will become GA in a week if no problem pops up.

All projects can be downloaded here.

Note that Hibernate Search 3.1.0.Beta1 is already aligned with Hibernate Core 3.3.0.GA.

Enjoy

3.3.0.GA got released the other day with an uncaught problem. A public method got removed from some of the events (specifically PreInsertEvent and PreUpdateEvent) which is causing problems with Hibernate Validator and which will probably cause problems for any applications utilizing custom listeners for those events.

Therefore, later today I will be releasing 3.3.0.SP1 to correct that oversight. I apologize for any inconveniences.

The SP1 release has been done and is available as either the full distribution from SourceForge or as artifacts from the JBoss Maven repository.

I will be talking about Web Beans at JSF.One September 4-6 in Washington and QCon San Francisco 2008 about Hibernate and scalability.

The Web Bean talk is an introduction to the elegant loosely coupled strongly typed component model that Web Beans introduces. After a brief intro, I will walk through examples to demonstrate how each concept is used in practice. Depending on how advanced the reference implementation is, I might try to make some of these live.

The second talk will cover Hibernate and Scalability. I will co-present with Max Ross from Google (one of the engineers behind Hibernate Shards). We will cover various subjects:

• stateless session
• how Software as a Service providers scale Hibernate in their platforms
• some of the patterns that ensure better scalability
• Hibernate Shards and how to scale to many DBs
• Hibernate Search and how to save your DBA's butt

Hope to see you there!

Hibernate 3.3.0.GA has been released. A big thanks to everyone who helped us get here.

A few changes from 3.2 worth noting:

1. Migration to a Maven-based build
2. Splitting of the project into modular jars (here I mean what Maven calls modules). This allows users to easily see and minimize dependencies.
3. Redesigned second-level caching SPI
4. Integration with JBossCache 2.x as a second level cache provider.

I'll be following up with more detailed blogs about some of the specific points.

You can download the full distribution from SourceForge or make use of the Maven artifacts from the JBoss Maven repository.