What this book covers

Chapter 1 is a compressive chapter that will help you discover the features brought by the new JBoss Tools 3.0. The main goal of this chapter is to make an introduction to what will follow in the next chapters and to "wake up" your curiosity. In addition, the reader can see different possibilities of installing JBoss Tools on different platforms and for different goals.

Chapter 2 teaches you how to use Eclipse and JBoss AS in a symbiotic manner. In this chapter you will see how to use the JBoss AS Tools to configure, start, stop and monitor the JBoss AS directly from Eclipse IDE. Also, you can see how to create and deploy new projects.

Chapter 3 is a collection of tag-components from different technologies as Ajax, JSF, RichFaces, Seam, and so on. Because the components are built on the drag-and-drop technique, this tool is very easy to use, especially when you need a fast method for generating tags into JSP pages. This chapter will cover—with description and examples—the most important tags that can be generated through JBoss Palette. Also, the chapter will contain a section about the Palette Options.

Chapter 4 will talk about punctual framework's tools and I will start with JBoss Tools for Java Server Faces. After I present the Faces Config Editor, which is the main visual component for JSF support, I will follow the framework mains characteristics and I will discuss—from the JSF Tools perspective—about managed beans, validators, converters, navigation rules, and so on.

Chapter 5 will give you a complete cover of the graphical Struts editors that are used for generating/managing XML documents (configuration, tiles, validators). Also, you will see how to work with code generation and debug support for Struts projects. Everything will be sustained by images (captures) and examples.

Chapter 6 will show you how to accomplish the most important modules of a Seam project, like Action, Form, Entity, and so on through the Seam Tools filter in the first part. Later, in the second part of the chapter, you will work with the visual editors dedicated to increasing the speed of developing/controlling Seam components.

Chapter 7 will show some advanced skills, like Hibernate and Ant, generation of POJOs, debugging goals and reverse engineering control after a detailed presentation of how to use Hibernate Tools to speed up the configuration and mapping tasks.

Chapter 8 will discuss about the jBPM Tools. You will see how to develop and test a complete jBPM project.

Chapter 9 will detail the main concepts of JBossESB Services, and you will see how to use ESB Tools to develop such a Service.

Chapter 10 will help you create from scratch a WSDL document using WSDL Editor. You will generate a complete web service from a WSDL document and from a Java bean using WS Tools wizards, and you will publish a web service using jUDDI and Web Services Explorer. In addition, you will see how to generate a web service's client, how to test a web service through Web Services Explorer, how to convert WSDL documents to WSIL documents and how to inspect WSDL web services through WSIL and WSE.

Chapter 11 will work with the Portal Tools. You will see how to use the wizards for creating projects with Portlet Facets, creating the Java Portlet wizard and creating the JSF/Seam Portlet wizard.