Start evaluating Red Hat JBoss EAP 7 in less than 1 minute

Wouldn’t it be great if you could try out a new product within minutes, or even seconds? As a developer your time is limited, and the last thing you want is to spend large amounts of effort downloading, installing, or configuring a product just to try it out. Or even worse, .. get stuck troubleshooting the process of getting a product up and running that you’re not even sure you want to use.

Red Hat is working with Codenvy to make it easier for developers to evaluate Red Hat technologies by allowing them to launch products in a browser-based IDE that is also running a helpful quickstart. It’s as simple as clicking a “Try It Now” button for the product you want to evaluate, and within ~30 seconds you can start editing the quickstart code within a cloud IDE.

We’re running a beta of this new “Try It Now” functionality, and we’d love your feedback. The beta will launch an Eclipse Che IDE running JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) 7 along with the kitchensink quickstart, which you can edit, build and debug. This quickstart demonstrates how to create a compliant Java EE 7 application using JSP, CDI, JAX-RS, EJB, JPA and Bean Validation 1.0.

Once you are in the cloud developer workspace, you’ll have everything you need to experiment with Red Hat JBoss EAP 7:

• The Red Hat JBoss EAP 7 runtime
• The kitchensink sample application code
• Commands needed to build, run or debug the kitchensink
• Cheat sheets that step you through the kitchensink code
• A browser-based IDE
• Agents for code assist, refactoring, SSH and debugging

How do I sign up for the beta?

1. Make sure you’re a member of the Red Hat Developer Program
2. Complete the sign up form for the “Try It Now” beta

If you’re selected, the first wave of invite emails will go out on Wednesday, May 10. In the email, you will be asked to provide us feedback through a quick, online survey. If you complete the survey, you’ll get $10 towards your purchase at the Red Hat Cool Stuff Store. The number of developers being accepted into the beta is limited, so don’t wait to sign up!

Now let’s take a quick look under the hood at how “Try It Now” works:

1. The “Try It Now” button (or link) calls a URL which points to a JSON file that defines the developer workspace to create in Eclipse Che.
2. The JSON includes information on...
   1. The workspace: list of projects, list of environments that contain machines required to execute the code, list of commands that operate against the environment, a workspace type corresponding to the target language(s)
   2. The machine recipe for either a single-machine or multi-machine environment, and the location of the machine recipes.
   3. The repo to clone from: repo type,  location, branch to clone from, and commit ID to use.
   4. Instantiation settings that control whether new workspaces are created for each click or only on the first  click (subsequent clicks open the original workspace).
   5. Post-load events - open files and start commands.
   6. Creator - name, email and creation date of the JSON.
3. The JSON is parsed by the Codenvy server which then starts the set of containers defined in the JSON.
4. Developer agents are injected into the runtime containers to add language services (e.g. auto-complete, syntax checking, etc…), a debugger and a terminal to interact with the container(s).
5. Once the containers are instantiated, the code is cloned in.
6. The Eclipse Che IDE is then loaded into the browser (it takes <100MB per tab).
7. Finally the commands are added to the IDE so that anyone can interact with the environment.

If you’re interested in the nuances of the system check out the Eclipse Che docs.