JBoss Developer Tools is a bundle of Eclipse plug-ins for Eclipse which help when developing applications using a various frameworks, some of which are JBoss specific and some which are standards based, but still JBoss related. In particular this helps developers get to grips with Java EE 6 web development using JSF, CDI, EJB and JPA by integrating the use of these individual frameworks in the IDE.

For example, it provides tooling for the JPA standard and specifically the Hibernate implementation of JPA. Of most interest is the new Java Contexts and Dependency Injection (CDI , JSR 299) tooling which can go hand in hand with their excellent JSF page editing.

You should start with an Eclipse installation that will support JBoss Tools (see the download page for more details on which Eclipse versions are supported.

Prerequisite Eclipse Plug-ins

Before we install JBoss tools, there are a some additional plug-ins that need installing first as prerequisites as described in the JBoss Tools install instructions. These plug-ins, as well as the JBoss Tools plug-ins themselves will be installed using the Eclipse update manager which is opened by opening the menu Help->Install New Software…. This manager has a list of URLs that Eclipse can use to locate and download plug-ins from remote locations called update sites.

1. Open the install manager by clicking the menu item Help->Install New Software….
2. In the install manager, click the Add button to add a new update site.
3. In the dialog that pops up, add BIRT as the Name, and set Location to http://download.eclipse.org/birt/update-site/2.5/. Click OK to close the dialog.
4. Back in the install manager, in the top drop down box select the BIRT site and you should see a list of available plug-ins appear in the main list area
5. Click the check box next to each of the plug-ins and click Next.
6. Once you agree to the licenses and click Finish Eclipse will download and install the plug-ins. Once complete, it will ask if you want to restart Eclipse now or later. Restart Eclipse now before we install additional plug-ins.
7. Repeat the above steps for the Maven m2Eclipse plug-ins. In the “Add Site” dialog, set the Name to m2Eclipse and the Location to http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org/sites/m2e/.
8. Once added, select the m2Eclipse site and check all the items in the plug-in list.
9. Once the m2Eclipse plug-ins are installed, opt to restart eclipse

Installing JBoss Tools

Now we will install the plug-ins for Boss Tools, again using update sites as in the previous steps.

1. Click Help->Install New Software… to open the install manager.
2. Add a new site called JBoss Tools. The Location for the site is http://download.jboss.org/jbosstools/updates/stable/galileo/. Click OK.
3. In the install manager, select the JBoss Tools site to download plug-ins from. You should see a long list of available plug-ins. Again, check them all and click Next.
4. Once it has calculated requirements and dependencies, you should be able to click Next again, and check the license agreement and click Next.
5. Finally, it will download and install the JBoss Tools plug-ins. This may take a while since the contents are in the region of just under 100 megabytes.
6. Again, once complete, you should restart Eclipse
7. You are done, you should now have a working installation of JBoss Developer Tools

Dependency Issues

Eclipse can have problems with missing dependencies indicating that there are missing required plug-ins. In such a case, see what plug-ins are missing in the Install Details tab in the Details section. Verify that you have downloaded the correct version of the Eclipse SDK as per the JBoss Tools instructions. Also make sure you downloaded the Eclipse SDK version for Java EE. If you need to access older versions of the Eclipse SDK, you can do so from this download page. Try searching online for the error message to see if it is a common problem.

Prerequisites
• Installing and configuring Eclipse
• Download and install a web server
  • JBoss Application Server
  • Tomcat

If you want to do some web development with Eclipse, you will need a web server for it to run on. The process for adding a server to Eclipse is usually the same for different server vendors. Typically though each vendor has different configuration options for setting up the server. For now, we’ll look at adding the server into the Eclipse environment.

Adding Servers

Servers are added by letting Eclipse know what type of server you want to install and where it is installed locally. You must have already downloaded and installed a web server before adding it into the Eclipse environment.

1. Select Window->Show->Other… to bring up the view selector.
2. Start typing server and you will see the view list is filtered.
3. We want the Servers view, not the JBoss Server View, that is now deprecated.
4. Double click on the Servers item and the view selector will close and the Servers tab will open up in the bottom half of the IDE window.
5. In the Servers window, right click and select New->Server to bring up the New Server dialog

6. Select the appropriate server runtime for the server you are using from the list. If your server doesn’t appear in the list then click the “Download additional server adapters” link above the list.
   Adding a new server adapater
   1. In the Install New Extension dialog, wait for it to finish downloading the list of available server adapters and try and find the right one for your server.
   2. Once found, select your server and click Next, agree to any license terms and click Finish to install the adapter.
   3. Once installed, you should restart Eclipse when asked. Upon restarting, you will need to go back to step 5 of this process except this time, your server should appear in the initial list.
7. When you have found your server type in the list of servers, click Next and fill in any required details. This should mostly be about telling Eclipse in which directory the server installation is located and click Next. For most servers it will let you know if you are pointing it to the wrong directory or it cannot find the installed server in that directory.
8. The Add and Remove tab lets you add existing projects in the workspace to the new server. Unless you have any open projects, you don’t need to worry about this right now.
9. When you click finish, your new server should appear in the Servers panel. Click on it, expand it and right click on it, and you can see there are options for starting, stopping and restarting the servers. When you add projects to the server, you will be able to select them for republishing.

With a server installed, you can develop web applications using Eclipse and it will deploy the application for you when needed. This is if you downloaded the version of Eclipse for Java EE developers. If you download and install the m2Eclipse plugins you will be able to develop and deploy Maven web projects in Eclipse with the same benefits.

Installing and setting up Eclipse

We’ll start by downloading the Eclipse SDK which is the base IDE that we will be installing plug-ins into. At the time of writing, Eclipse SDK 3.5.2 is the most recent version. You need to download the version for Java EE developers since it contains most of the other required plug-ins for things like web development. You can download Eclipse from the Eclipse download site. Once downloaded, unzip it into a folder of your choice. The zip file usually creates a directory called eclipse in the target directory that you unzipped the contents into.

Memory Settings

By default, Eclipse uses lousy memory settings, but we can alter the eclipse.ini file in the eclipse install directory to give us a better environment to work in. In the eclipse directory that appeared when you unzipped eclipse, there is an eclipse.ini file. Edit this file and you will see a section that starts with -vmargs. After this sections, you will see a couple of items starting with -xms and -xmx. Edit this section so that it reads something like :

-Xms256m
-Xmx512m
-XX:MaxPermSize=256m

Don’t delete any other items in this section, just replace any that are existing and add others that are not already there.

The values you use depends on how much memory you have, but this is a decent amount. You can go with less, or more depending on how much free memory you have. See here for more details on Eclipse memory settings.

Running Eclipse under a different JVM

You can also tell Eclipse to run using a specific JVM or JDK in the eclipse.ini file by adding a -vm entry. You may need to do this if you have a 64-bit JVM and you need to run Eclipse under a 32-bit JVM. Another reason to add this to the configuration is because the Maven plug-ins we’ll be adding later prefers to run under a JDK instead of a JRE.

Open up eclipse.ini and add the following 2 lines :

-vm
C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.xxx\bin\javaw.exe

Note : This must be on 2 separate lines and they must be placed before the -vm arguments. Otherwise it will not work.

Now we have Eclipse installed and the environment configured, we’ll take it for a test. Run eclipse.exe and Eclipse should launch. If not, check that you are using a valid path and filename for the -vm option. If you are pointing to a 64-bit JVM and have 32-bit only plugins installed, this can cause silent failures.

When Eclipse starts up, if you go to Help->About Eclipse and the about dialog pops up. Click on the Installation Details button and in the window that pops up, click on the Configuration tab. In the big configuration listing, near the bottom of the window (you might have to scroll down a little) you should see something like :

eclipse.vm=C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.xxxx\bin\javaw.exe
eclipse.vmargs=-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.5
-Xms256m
-Xmx512m
-XX:MaxPermSize=256m

This confirms that our memory settings are being picked up, and the JDK we specified is being used.

Adding Maven Support

While this article doesn’t intend to cover any other plugins, Maven support in Eclipse is a rather fundamental one for getting started with projects. Here are the steps to install the m2Eclipse Maven plug-ins.

1. Open the install manager by clicking the menu item Help->Install New Software….
2. In the install manager, click the Add button to add a new update site.
3. In the dialog that pops up, add m2Eclipse as the Name, and set Location to http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org/sites/m2e/. Click OK to close the dialog.
4. Select the m2Eclipse URL in the drop down and click the check box next to the Maven Integration for Eclipse plug-in in the list and click Next.
5. Once you agree to the licenses and click Finish Eclipse will download and install the plug-ins. Once complete, it will ask if you want to restart Eclipse now or later. It is best to re-start Eclipse before you start a new project or adding more plug-ins.