As you know, Eclipse offers an ingenious system of perspectives that helps us to switch between different technologies and to keep the main-screen as clean as possible. Every perspective is made of a set of components that can be added/removed by the user. These components are known as views.

The JBoss AS Perspective has a set of specific views as follows:

• JBoss Server View
• Project Archives View
• Console View
• Properties View

For launching the JBoss AS Perspective (or any other perspective), follow these two simple steps:

1. From the Window menu, select Open Perspective | Other article.
2. In the Open Perspective window, select the JBoss AS option and click on OK button (as shown in the following screenshot).

3. If everything works fine, you should see the JBoss AS perspective as shown in the following screenshot:
4. If any of these views is not available by default in your JBoss AS perspective, then you can add it manually by selecting from the Window menu the Show View | Other option. In the Show View window (shown in the following screenshot), you just select the desired view and click on the OK button.

JBoss Server View

This view contains a simple toolbar known as JBoss Server View Toolbar and two panels that separate the list of servers (top part) from the list of additional information about the selected server (bottom part). Note that the quantity of additional information is directly related to the server type.

Top part of JBoss Server View

In the top part of the JBoss Server View, we can see a list of our servers, their states, and if they are running or if they have stopped.

Starting the JBoss AS

The simplest ways to start our JBoss AS server are:

1. Select the JBoss 4.2 Server from the server list and click the Start the server button from the JBoss Server View Toolbar (as shown in the following screenshot).

2. Select the JBoss 4.2 Server from the server list and right-click on it. From the context menu, select the Start option (as shown in the following screenshot).

In both cases, a detailed evolution of the startup process will be displayed in the Console View, as you can see in the following screenshot.

Stopping the JBoss AS

The simplest ways to stop JBoss AS server are:

• Select the JBoss 4.2 Server from the server list and click the Stop the server button from the JBoss Server View Toolbar.

• Select the JBoss 4.2 Server from the server list and right-click on it. From the context menu, select the Stop option.

In both cases, a detailed evolution of the stopping process will be displayed in the Console View, as you can see in the following screenshot.

Additional operations on JBoss AS

Beside Start and Stop operations, JBoss Server View allows us to:

• Add a new server (the New Server option from the contextual menu)
• Remove an existing server (the Delete option from the contextual menu)
• Start the server in debug mode (first button on the JBoss Server View Toolbar)
• Start the server in profiling mode (third button on the JBoss Server View Toolbar)
• Publish to the server or synching the publish information between the server and the workspace (the Publish option from the contextual menu or the last button on the JBoss Server View Toolbar)
• Discard all publish state and republish from scratch (the Clean option from the contextual menu)
• Twiddle server (the Twiddle Server option from the contextual menu)
• Edit launch configuration (the Edit Launch Configuration option from the contextual menu as shown in the following screenshot).

• Add/remove projects (the Add and Remove Projects option from the contextual menu)
• Double-click the server name and modify parts of that server in the Server Editor—if you have a username and a password to start the server, then you can specify those credentials here (as shown in the following screenshot).

Twiddle is a JMX library that comes with JBoss, and it is used to access (any) variables that are exposed via the JBoss JMX interfaces.

Server publish status

A server may have one of the following statuses:

• Synchronized: Allows you to see if changes are sync (as shown in the follo

  wing screenshot)

• Publishing: Allows you to see if changes are being updated
• Republish: Allows you to see if changes are waiting