JBoss Developer Studio 4.0 Adds Supports BPM, Rules and Cloud 
Red Hat is offering JBoss Developer Studio 4, an upgrade to its integrated open source tooling and platforms for SOA, BPM, business rules and portals. IDN talks with R Sharples about the new features and the much-anticipated technology preview for JBoss BPEL tool.
Red Hat is offering JBoss Developer Studio 4, an upgrade to its integrated open source tooling and platforms for SOA, BPM, business rules and portals. IDN talks with R Sharples about the new features and the much-anticipated technology preview for JBoss BPEL tool.
JBoss Developer Studio 4 includes Business Process Modeling tools for business process workflows; JBoss Rules (Drools) tools for creating and editing business rules and decision tables for workflows; SOA tools for SOA-based integration applications including support for ESB components; XSLT and Smooks tools for transformation; portal tools. Spring IDE
Download JBoss Developer Studio 4.0 here.
JBoss Developer Studio 4 also is integrated with JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss SOA Platform, JBoss Enterprise BRMS Platform, and JBoss Portal Platform, allowing devs to build and test their applications on the same open source infrastructures they deploy.
“We’ve often been known as the company that supports the ‘alpha geek,’ the very technical expert developer,” Rich Sharples, director of project management, told IDN. “But developers are being asked to do much more today, and our customers are asking that we broaden our focus so our tools can make all types of developers more productive.”
JBoss Developer Studio Supports
Dev Projects for Cloud, On-Premise SOA
JBoss Developer Studio 4 also adds remote deployment and management, taking JBoss Developer Studio run, load and test capabilities beyond a local machine into the cloud. “There is definitely a push on developers to shorten development lifecycles and often without a dedicated QA group,” Sharples said.
“Today we see quite a lot of people who want to deploy and test on Amazon and Rackspace, so with this, if you’re a developer using a moderately powered laptop, you have the power to call into [your location], spin up instances, run and load test and have access to as many external resources as you want,” he said. “It’s pretty stupefying to be able pull forward some of the later lifecycle and load testing and things you can’t do on the developer workstation.”
JBoss Developer Studio’s current support and future roadmap for adding rules, workflows and exception handling. It also includes a tech preview of the JBoss BPEL project planned for release later in 2011. “JBoss essentially took over the lead of this project,” Sharples said. “This design tool leverages the Eclipse BPEL toolkit, and requires no coding. This is one example of a different class of developer.”
Sharples illustrated the productivity that results from JBoss Developer Studio 4.0. “So, for example, if your company needs an application for a customer loyalty program, with Developer Studio 4.0 a developer can work at many different layers,” he said. In fact, the same developer can design, test the services and logic, build the interfaces and create the workflows, he added.
JBoss Developer Studio also updates many key JBoss SOA Platform features, including:
- Guvnor. The open source repository component for Drools Knowledge Bases, where you can store versions of rules, models, functions, processes.
- Drools 5. An open source business management rules system with a business logic integration platform. The combo provides a unified and integrated platform for rules, workflow and event processing.
- jBPM 3. A light-weight, extensible workflow engine written in pure Java that allows you to execute business processes using the latest BPMN 2.0 specification. It can run in any Java environment, embedded in your application or as a service.
“Developers are being asked to do much more today and customers are asking our tools to make all types of developers more productive."
Rich Sharples
Director of Project Management Applications Platforms and Developer Tools
Red Hat
- Teiid Designer. A data virtualization tool that allows applications to use data from multiple, heterogeneous data stores through abstraction and federation.
- Modeshape. Modeshape (formerly “JBoss DNA”) that provides access to content stored in many different kinds of systems. Modeshape gets its content by federating multiple back-end systems (like databases, services, other repositories, etc.), which allows those systems to continue “owning” the information while ensuring the unified repository stays up-to-date and in sync.
Under the covers, Modeshape is a JCR 2.0 (JSR-283) implementation that also comes with a repository to provide a JCR view of file systems, databases, other repositories, services, and applications in your environment. Using the JCR API, applications can search, navigate, version, and listen for changes in the content.
Other JBoss Developer Studio 4.0 features include updates for:
- Tools for Seam 2.2, a powerful framework for building next-generation rich internet applications, as well as tools for the new popular specification (JSR 299). Contexts and Dependency Injection for the Java EE Platform (CDI), are included. The Seam tools provide wizards for creating new Seam projects, validation tools, expression language code completion, and testing tools.
- Visual Page Editor. Supports combined visual and source editing of web pages, including rendering AJAX-enabled JSF plus RichFaces pages as well as JSP, HTML, and XHTML pages.
- AJAX capabilities. With 120 RichFaces components, additions include tooling support for JBoss RichFaces, a rich component library for JSF and an advanced framework for easily integrating AJAX capabilities into business app development.
- Optimized JBoss Application Server Adapter. Adds features such as incremental hot deployment and is pre-configured for the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, which is included.
JBoss Developer Studio comes with one entitlement to Red Hat Enterprise Linux with built-in development tools and Red Hat Network Access for development purposes. JBoss Developer Studio Portfolio Edition is available as a subscription for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X for $99.
Early reaction from JBoss community has been very enthusiastic, Sharples told IDN. “For some it is eye opening; they realize these powerful tools let them meet a lot of new business requirements without requiring a whole bunch of Java code,” he said. “Further, this approach lets devs and business users better collaborate to make sure requirements can be quickly met, without the need to write multiple versions.”
