Eclipse Web Tools Platform 3.0
New and Noteworthy

Server Tools

Downloadable Jetty support

The Eclipse Web Tools Platform has added Jetty to its list of downloadable server adapters. Jetty users can now develop and deploy Web applications directly to this popular Web application server directly from within Eclipse.

New Server Wizard Improvements

The New Server wizard has some minor updates to reflect Eclipse usability guidelines and several enhancements requests, including the ability to directly open up a new runtime wizard without going through the preferences page, or name a server during creation.

Server Editor Improvements

The server editor has been updated in M2, including better support for the forms UI. This includes field assist warnings and errors, a few new warnings, and minor UI improvements in the General section.

More specific Start and Stop Timeouts

To aid in scenarios with larger applications and/or slower hardware, the server start/stop timeouts are now fully settable.

Cloning of Servers

The Servers view now allows for Servers to be copy and pasted to create new Servers. These copies will start with the same Runtime configured and the same list of modules as the original, but without any monitoring.

Servers View context menu improvements

The context menu of the Server view has been updated to contain key bindings shortcuts for actions that are common to the Eclipse Platform.

Servers View tooltips

We have added tooltips to the Servers view. The default tooltips will display the vendor of the server and the number of modules it contains.
This is only the default behavior. Adopters can extend this functionality using the org.eclipse.wst.server.ui.serverToolTip extension point.

Server Automatic Publishing setting

Simplified UI for Automatic Publishing settings, by providing one time for all types of servers, local and remote. The initial value is provided by the server adopter.
In addition to simplifying the UI, the settings are now stored only in the server object and will get carried between workspaces when sharing .server files.

Tooltip for spinners

Tooltips for spinners now provide aid in converting seconds to minutes when appropriate

Cleanup of the Server Preferences dialog

Many of the option in the Preferences dialog have been moved to other location. Some have been moved into Server editor others are now implicit action. As a result the Preferences for servers have now been minimized.

Server Publishers

Work has begun on a new "publish task" framework to allow server adapters and extenders to add custom tasks into the publish flow of a server. The initial API is available and the first 'publisher' extension is provided for Tomcat. It is a dialog that will prompt the user to update the Tomcat configuration if a context root has been changed in the IDE but not changed on the server.