Tuesday March 24, 2009

For me, it's Ground Zero for EclipseCon, 2009.  I wanted to get an early start to post about the GlassFish Tools Bundle for Eclipse, but it looks like Ludo beat me to the punch.  I was slowed down a bit by the fact that I forgot to pack toothpaste, which does not exactly mash well with booth duty. No worries, the hotel lobby personnel had my back, so my breath is minty fresh :-)

Sooooo, Sun is announcing the GlassFish Tools Bundle for Eclipse, which bundles community editions of GlassFish v2.1 and GlassFish v3 Prelude, Eclipse 3.4 (with Web Tools Platform), GlassFish Eclipse plugin and optionally JDK 1.6.  In addition, we've included the Java EE Javadocs, so you get Java EE API auto-completion.

Here are some notes about the bundle I think are worthwhile to mention:

• The GlassFish Tools Bundle for Eclipse v0.9.9 is not quite FCS yet. Great quality, but we have a few motions to go through for a 1.0 release.  We're doing everything we can to get to 1.0 as quickly as possible.
  
  
• The GlassFish Tools Bundle for Eclipse is *extending* the reach of GlassFish into the Eclipse community. In the past, developers had to pull together too many pieces (above) to get an Eclipse-based GlassFish environment.
  
  
• To preempt the tinfoil hats, GlassFish will continue to ship with the award winning NetBeans IDE. In fact, check out this video Adam Bien's presentation at Community One East on the NetBeans 6.7 with GlassFish v3 Prelude. 3 slides and a ton of code.
  
  
• If you are interested in using GlassFish with Eclipse, the GlassFish Tools Bundle for Eclipse is the quickest way to get there.  Eclipse is pre-configured (err, pre-integrated) with GlassFish, including log file viewing, http monitor, and more.
  
  
• With GlassFish v3 Prelude, Eclipse developers don't lose HTTP session state when their application is re-deployed. Developer lifecycle simplified to edit-save-refresh browser. Keeps your mind on the problem, not the tool!
  
  
• With GlassFish v3 Prelude, developers get an early look at Java EE 6 APIs, including JSF 2.0 Early Access and EJB 3.1 Lite Early Access (both in the Update Center).  JAX-RS is final and fully supported (also in Update Center).
  
  
• The GlassFish Tools Bundle for Eclipse supports Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. No worries, OpenSolaris is coming.