Red Hat JBoss Developer Studio 7 Accelerates Mobile Development

It’s official: Red Hat JBoss Developer Studio 7 is live! If you’re a regular visitor to the JBoss Developer Studio site, you may have noticed some changes in recent weeks. We’ve been busy putting the final touches on the next version of JBoss Developer Studio—Red Hat’s comprehensive integrated developer environment (IDE)—and are pleased to announce that it is now available for download.

JBoss Developer Studio has a history of delivering cutting-edge tools to developers building everything from rich web and mobile web applications to transactional enterprise and service-oriented architecture (SOA)-based applications. The new 7.0 release of JBoss Developer Studio continues this heritage and offers a number of exciting features to enhance the development of mobile applications, streamline the process of starting to build applications, and improve overall performance and stability.

Here’s a snapshot of some of these features:

LiveReload – One of the more time-consuming steps in developing an application is the need to stop and manually refresh the HTML page in browsers or on mobile devices in order to view the changes being made. By adding a LiveReload server to automatically refresh the browsers on the fly as a project is modified, we have eliminated interruptions caused by manual browser refreshes. LiveReload provides developers with a preview of their work that more accurately represents the end-user experience, allowing them to better focus on the content and functionality of their applications.

BrowserSim – Developers often face the challenge of designing and creating applications that are functional and aesthetically pleasing when viewed on a plethora of different platforms and devices. We’ve added several new features to BrowserSim in JBoss Developer Studio 7 that are designed to help ease this challenge by allowing developers to test their web applications in various resolutions, dimensions and mobile device skins. These features include synced browsing, which shows multiple layout modes simultaneously; Firebug Lite for easier local and remote (via Weinre) debugging; screenshots for project presentation and collaboration; and the addition of new skins to support a bevy of mobile device options.

HTML5/jQuery Mobile Tooling – One of the largest challenges faced by mobile application developers is to create web applications that are optimized across both desktop and mobile clients. jQuery is a popular cross-browser JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML. Fast, small, and feature-rich, jQuery simplifies HTML document traversal and manipulation, event handling, animation, and Ajax. To help developers be even more productive, JBoss Developer Studio 7 has added support for five new jQuery Mobile widgets and their associated wizards via a new HTML5 palette to improve the mobile development experience. These widgets relate to the form, image, video, audio, and label of an application.

Based on feedback from a number of users, we’ve also included wizards for Forge integration as a technology preview in JBoss Developer Studio 7. Details on the specific wizards and Forge features can be found at https://community.jboss.org/en/tools/blog/2013/07/23/jboss-tools-41-and-developer-studio-7-go-ga.

For a video demonstration of these new features, visit http://vimeo.com/67480300.