Red Hat JBoss Developer Studio 7 has now gone live for programmers who want to get hold of this "comprehensive" IDE for rich web and mobile web applications. The IDE itself broad enough to be suited to transactional enterprise and service-oriented architecture (SOA)-based applications.
Along with the standard in-every-vendor-release augmentations of improved overall performance and stability, new and more interesting here is the addition of LiveReload. Red Hat reminds us that 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.
According to the JBozz developer blog, "By adding a LiveReload 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."
Red Hat's JBoss team also explains that it has spent time focusing on the challenge of designing and creating applications that are functional and aesthetically pleasing when viewed on a plethora of different platforms and devices. In this area, we see several new features to BrowserSim in JBoss Developer Studio 7 designed allow developers to test their web applications in various resolutions, dimensions, and mobile device skins.
In Red Hat's view, one of the largest challenges faced by mobile application developers is the task of creating web applications that are optimized across both desktop and mobile clients. So now here we find jQuery — a cross-browser JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML. In practice, 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," said the company.