JBoss Developer Studio

JBoss Developer Studio (JBDS) is a development environment created on top of Eclipse and is currently developed by the Red Hat JBoss division. Some companies such as Exadel, the Eclipse foundation, and open source individuals are also working on the JBoss Developer Studio project. JBDS empowers users with a set of plugins, called JBoss Tools; it supports multiple programming models, frameworks, and technologies, including Maven, SVN, and Git.

JBoss Developer Studio is modular like Eclipse and supports development with multiple JVM versions. At the time of writing this book, the last JBDS release version is 10.3.0. JBDS is available as other Jboss products on the Red Hat developer portal--developers.redhat.com; you need a social account (GitHub, Stack Overflow, Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, Google, or Microsoft) and credentials to download the software.

Installation

JBoss Developer studio installation requires the following configuration:

• 4 GB RAM (minimum 2 GB RAM)
• 2 GB hard disk space
• JDK 8 to run, but it can deploy applications using lower versions

Download devstudio-10.3.0.GA-installer-standalone.jar and begin the installation using the following command:

java -jar devstudio-10.3.0.GA-incstaller-standalone.jar

This installation needs JRE 8 to proceed; once launched, the GUI installer starts an installation workflow where you will have to click on the Next button to move to the next step:

The installation wizard has nine steps, which are easy to follow:

Read and accept the terms of the license agreement:

Installation is done by default in /Applications/devstudio; you can change this directory to use a custom one:

Select the default Java 8 Virtual machine and click on Next button:

JBDS can scan specific directories to reference your existing JBoss servers.

We will not add a specific location for now; we will just move on to the next steps:

The installer displays the installation path, the component to be installed, as well as the available and required space on your computer. Click on the Next button to proceed with the installation:

In step 7/9 details of each installed component are printed on screen. Wait for the overall installation process to complete:

Click on Done to finish, with the Run Red Hat JBoss Developer after installation option checked. Select a fresh workspace to reach the welcome view.

We will use the $HOME/jbdevgWorkspace folder for our installation throughout this book:

This completes the JBDS installation. Once the JBDS installation is complete, you need to ensure that all the development plugins are also installed. While working with JBoss, the integration stack provides a set of plugins and features to ease the development process; let's install the JBoss integration stack plugin.

Integration Stack

By default, JBoss Tools is installed along with JBDS; this is not the case for the JBoss Integration Stack, which provides users with a toolset to integrate applications. It works with Apache Camel, JBoss Data virtualization, and various others features related to Integration.

The most simple way to install the JBoss Integration Stack is from the Red Hat central view:

Check the listed options:

• JBoss Fuse Development
• JBoss Data Virtualization Development
• JBoss Business Process and Rule Development
• JBoss Integration and SOA Development

Integration stack plugins can also be installed from a ZIP file at http://tools.jboss.org/downloads/devstudio_is/.

Click on the install/update button and complete the installation steps. Each plugin has its own working problem to solve, and the user manual, as far as possible, refers to the official documentation of the plugin. In the current section, we install both the JBoss Developer Studio and the Integration stack plugin. We are now ready to create projects and work on them within the IDE. JBDS has an integrated console, called the Forge console, to perform some tasks quickly. In the next section, we will perform various project tasks using this console.