JBoss Tools 3.x Road map

This page outlines the focus areas we will be working on for JBoss Tools 3.x.

This is a work in progress and if you think something is missing/incorrect then please raise it on our mailing list or forums or simply adjust the page if it is a minor correction.

Detailed road map with concrete issues and bug fixes is to be found in our jira

For the moment this roadmap is split up in three sections, "General", "Web 2.0" and "SOA" to group the functionality according to their main target audience. Even though they are split up in different sections it does not mean they do not overlap, e.g. JBoss AS, Project Archives and Hibernate will all be relevant for SOA even though they are in Web 2.0 and the same goes for jBPM and Drools which are also relevant for Web 2.0 even though they are in SOA. The division is merely to group these according to the focus of the teams that are primarily working on these. Collaboration will be needed

JbdsRoadMap captures JBDS specific issues.

General

Installation

JbtUpgradeTo3x should be filled in with the user visible changes in configuration/installation.

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is focusing around Seam and related functionality. Note: This does not mean that the features depend on Seam, having a good experience in context of Seam is though the overall goal.

p.s. if anyone has a better name than Web 2.0 - please speak up

JBoss AS

JbtHarSarEsbDepoymentSupport many users have been having problems with deploying HAR, SAR, ESB etc. archives in JBT. We should make that easier. Suggested solutions is to look into having a WTP module type for these and/or provide a way to control which suffix (.har,.sar,.esb vs. default .jar) will be used when deploying.

JbtJBossASDeploymentControl today all deployments via our JBoss adapter will be exploded. That is not always what you would like to happen. Having more control per module/project on how deployment should be would make sense.

JbtJBoss5Support JBoss 5 should be a first class citizen for us.

Project Archives

Input needed.

Hibernate

JbtHibernateDaliSupport Dali is part of Ganymede and we should provide a Hibernate platform to Dali, enabling Hibernate specific features to be used easily in JPA projects.

JbtDecouplingHibernateFromTools currently we use the bundled Hibernate jars to load the users classes and execute the queries and code generation. Tying us to a very specific version of Hibernate, we should investigate launching as many of these functionalities in an external process.

JbtHibernateConsoleValidation currently we have only several exceptions in case something is wrong during building of internal model. It should be done in Eclipse way with incremental builder and should post error markers with Quick Fixes available.

JbtForwardEngineering currently only Reverse Engineering is supported, so it  takes a while make several classes persistent from scratch http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/JBIDE-2077

Seam

JbtDecoupleSeamFacet have proper Seam facet and introduce our own "overall" project wizard.

JbtSeamPagesXmlEditor the most voted for feature in JBT was graphical support for pages.xml editing. We will add that.

JbtSeamELRefactoring

Visual Page Editor

JbtXulRunner19

Bring back caret for VPE

Because: the visual editor is really hard to use without knowing where you are.

- Support relative path in non-web projects.

- EL resolving

- Support CDATA

- Recreate DnD feature.

http://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/JBIDE-1304 - Docbook XML editor (please, look at comments)

http://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/JBIDE-1601 - XML Schema or DTD for VPE templates

http://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/JBIDE-1600 - Template Designer (we need at least documentation how to develop templates)

- Richfaces 3.2 components

Bring an editing possibility to visual part of VPE. For example the slider has two values the min and the max. We should be able to edit this values in visual part.

Because: it is the visual page editor.

To improve performance on large files

Because: our editor must be convenient.

Various:

Add more templates of projects.

Because: I think we should give more points to start to our users.

- Exclude .vpe.adf and vpe.tomahawk plugins because they are out of date.

- Add unit tests with content checking for templates.

- Add CSS editor dialog

- Switch XulRunner in design mode

- Support of DOCTYPE declaration

- Process invisible tags.

JSF

JbtUnifyElCodeCompletion

JbtBeautifyElCodeCompletion

Portal

JbtBasicPortalSupport

"SOA"

ESB

JbtESBXmlEditor

WebServices

Enable support for JBossWS in WTP

Drools

Input needed

jBPM

Input needed

Smooks

Transformation editor for Smooks

Usability

Error messages, logging, defaults.

Continuous build/Quality

unittests, pmd, coverage, publishing the results

Establish several related builds for JBossTools, JBossTools Tests, JBossTools Docs,JBDS, JBDS Tests(if we are going to have some, as example, we need test to check that JBoss EAP Server is created after JBDS first start), JBDS Docs.

Create JBossTools Update Site for Nightly builds for QA, to simplify installation.

Make it easy to identify what version, branch, build a given installation is running on (JBDS-288)

Platforms

JBoss Tools does not have anything platform specific functionality besides the Visual Page Editor which uses XULRunner.

Thus if you do not use the Visual Page Editor any platform Eclipse runs on JBoss Tools  will run on.

For VPE, the planned platforms are Windows XP/Vista, Linux 32-bit, Linux 64-bit and Mac OS X.

Runtime support

EAP 4.x and SOA-P 4.x should be supported (different levels of support)

JBoss 5.0 and EAP 5.0 when they become available should be supported.

Documentation

Context help for JBoss Tools - http://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/JBDS-264, http://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/JBIDE-1886