• Support for JBoss ESB, specifically the ability to create projects, deploy, debug and manage configurations.
• Improvements to the jPDL Graphical Process Designer
• A new Portlet wizard for creating JSR-186/268 Portlets
• A JSF and Seam portlet wizard
• For Hibernate / JPA – an annotation generator and better integration with DTP (Data Tools Project)
• Support for both Seam 2.0 and Seam 2.1
• A new visual page navigation editor and page navigation birds-eye-view.

For more details see Max’s JBoss Tools project announcement, and the docs.

The second thing we’re announcing is a change to our developer subscription and the introduction of JBoss Developer Studio – Portfolio Edition (or JBDS-PE). This new suite reflects the fact that JBDS has grown from being just a Seam / Java EE focussed tool set to now cover the whole JBoss portfolio – specifically that means the addition of some pretty sophisticated tooling for SOA and Portal development.

JBDS-PE gives you access to JBDS and all the JBoss run-times you need to develop against, access to Red Hat Network for updates   – all for $99 / year.

JBoss Web Services

JBoss DNA

WISE Project

Seam Framework

JBoss Tools Project

JBoss Tools Code Swarm (basic) from Max Andersen on Vimeo.

JBoss Portal Project

I’ll post more when / if they become available.

The nice folks at DZone have just released a Refcard for Seam. A Refcard is a “handy guide for understanding core concepts, configuration, and tool usage”. Get it here.

Bob McWhirter has been playing with JBoss and Rails integration; clearly he’s made a lot of progress – to the extent where he can start to eat his own dog food. His new work related blog (OddThesis) is running in a hosted environment on Rails on JBoss – great stuff.

I’ve already mentioned Jopr a couple of times but this wink demo caught my eye and I’m sure it will be a pretty important feature for the millions of Hibernate users out there – Monitoring Hibernate from Jopr. For what it’s worth – the name Jopr still isn’t working for me – my fingers want to type Jorp.

Max announced that JBoss Developer Studio (JBDS) 2.0 beta is available for free – you just have to sign up for an evaluation. Go here for more info. or here to register for the free eval.

Gavin King has an essay on how he thinks Web Beans needs to integrate with Java EE 6; it’s also a good explanation of what Web Beans is (and isn’t) and why it’s essential to EE 6.

Microsoft aren’t known for their commitment to openness, interoperability and providing customer choice; but the announcement that they’re joining the AMQP working group maybe demonstrates that a leapoard can change its spots. More importantly and practically – there is hope for simple and efficient interoperability with the world of Microsoft – assuming thet actually adopt AMQP in their platform.

Seam 2.1 was released a couple of weeks ago and in fact there’s already an update (Seam 2.1.0 SP1). Major updates in Seam 2.1 are :

identity management framework with ACL style permissions, an Excel reporting module, an embellished and more flexible seam-gen, first class support for Wicket, built-in support for URL rewriting and a technology preview of JAX-RS (REST) support through the RESTeasy project.

I was in Italy last week with the core Hibernate and Seam developers – working on he roadmaps / strategy for both. It was a great opportunity to meet some of JBoss’ best and brightest and put some email addresses to faces.

Instead of the usual over-priced hotel accommodation – the venue was a house in Tuscany. As well as offering better value for the money – it allowed the team to spend *a lot* of time together – pretty important for a very distributed bunch who rarely get the opportunity to meet. The working day ran from about 10am ’til 2am and the conversation continued through lunch and dinner. Pretty good value.

Needless to say I learned a huge amount – not least about fluid-dynamics and Etruscan vinicluture.

Update

More pictures from Jay, Marek, Chris and Sam.

It’s always great to see your own products streamlining business and saving customers money – but optimization often has consequences.

JBoss Portal has a new friend.

Seam meets Flex, and again. Hmm, this could be important – I need to take a crash course in the RIA world according to Adobe – any pointers ?

btw. Tab Sweep is a term and behavior I learned from reading Tim Bray’s blog