Chapter 4. Getting started with JBoss Developer Studio

JBoss Developer Studio is a collection of Eclipse plug-ins: a project creation wizard for Seam, a content assistant for the Unified Expression Language (EL) in both Facelets and Java, a graphical editor for jPDL, a graphical editor for Seam configuration files, support for running Seam integration tests from within Eclipse, and much more. For more information, review the JBoss Developer Studio Getting Started Guide available at http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/JBoss_Developer_Studio/index.html.
Procedures to execute the following Seam tasks in JBoss Developer Studio are in the Seam Developer Tools Reference Guide:
  • Setting up a Seam project.
  • Creating a new Seam action.
  • Creating a new form with an action.
  • Generating an application from an existing database.
The Seam Developer Tools Reference Guide is available at http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/JBoss_Developer_Studio/index.html.

4.1. Hot deployment with JBoss Developer Studio

JBoss Developer Studio supports incremental hot deployment of any Facelets page and any pages.xml file out of the box. But if we want to change any Java code, we still need to do a full restart of the application by doing a Full Publish.
Seam supports incremental redeployment of JavaBean components for a fast edit/compile/test cycle. To make use of this, the JavaBean components must be deployed into the WEB-INF/dev directory. Here, they will be loaded by a special Seam classloader instead of the WAR or EAR classloader.
This function has some limitations:
  • the components must be JavaBean components — they cannot be EJB3 beans. (Seam is working to remove this limitation.)
  • entities can never be hot-deployed
  • components deployed via components.xml may not be hot-deployed
  • the hot-deployable components will not be visible to any classes deployed outside of WEB-INF/dev
  • Seam debug mode must be enabled and jboss-seam-debug.jar must be in WEB-INF/lib
  • the Seam filter must be installed in web.xml
  • You may see errors if the system is placed under any load and debug is enabled.
For WAR projects created with JBoss Developer Studio, incremental hot deployment is available out of the box. However, JBoss Developer Studio does not support incremental hot deployment for EAR projects.