From Smooks

At JBoss, we’ve been making some good progress with the JBoss Tools Smooks Editor for Eclipse 3.5. We encourage you to give this plugin a try and let us know what you think.

Contents 1 The Editor In Action 2 Development Status 3 Other Screencasts 4 Try It Out

The Editor In Action

The following are two rough Screencasts illustrating two use cases that extend from each other.

In the first Screencast, we bind EDI Purchase Order data (but can also be XML, JSON etc) into an “Order” object model (Java). This Screencast was created in Dec '09, using the v3.1.0.CR1 release of JBoss Tools.

In the second Screencast, we extend the example shown in the above Screencast, applying a template to the "Order" object model to produce an XML Purchase Order. The XML Purchase Order is defined in an XML Schema (XSD), but you'll see how the editor makes it very easy to work with the XSD. This Screencast was created recently, using one of the Nightly Builds of JBoss Tools.

Development Status

We are currently working towards the v3.1.0.CR2 release of JBoss Tools, which is due to be released in Feb (not sure of exact date). There are still a number of issues with the editor. We are working on these and will be resolving many of them for the 3.1.0 CR2 and GA releases.

We have purposely restricted the functionality of the 3.1.0 version of the editor:

1. Supported Use Cases:
   • Java Mapping/Binding: Drag & Drop mapping/binding of XML, JSON, CSV and EDI data to Java.
   • CSV and XML Templating: Drag & Drop templating of Java Mappings (see #1 above) to produce CSV or XML (XML via XSD or XML Sample).
2. Supported Integration:
   • JBoss Tools ESB Editor: Will have basic open and edit integration with the ESB SmooksAction.
3. Supported Versions:
   • Smooks v1.2 Configurations: The Editor will only support Smooks v1.2 configuration namespaces. Therefore, if you have configurations using config namespaces from earlier (or newer v1.3) versions of Smooks, the editor will not open the configurations.

So, the 3.1.0 version of the editor will not support:

1. Direct Source to Result drag & drop templating e.g. XML to XML, EDI to XML, XML to CSV etc. We hope to support this in a future release (next one hopefully), but for now (in the v3.1.0 release), you need to define a Java Object model to use as the canonical form of the data being mapped i.e. v3.1.0 templating works as Source -> Java -> Result.
2. A number of features supported by the Smooks Runtime, such as Persistence, Validation, Splitting & Routing etc. We will be adding support for these in future releases.
3. Smooks v1.1 (and before) configuration namespaces that have newer versions in Smooks v1.2. For example, Smooks v1.2 added a v1.2 javabean config namespace. It is this version of the javabean config namespace that is supported by the editor. The v1.1 javabean config namespace is not supported.
4. Smooks v1.3 (yet to be released) configuration namespaces.

Other Screencasts

A few more Screencasts are available here on the JBoss Wiki.

Try It Out

Please take the editor for a spin and let us know what you think.

1. Download the appropriate ZIP file from the JBoss Tools Downloads Page (standalone Smooks Editor, or the main JBoss Tools Editor)).
2. Use the Eclipse Install Manager to install the plugin from the downloaded ZIP file.
3. Please log any issues you find with the editor (against the “smooks” component), if not already logged.

Also, see the following Screencast illustrating how to install JBoss Tools.