This month’s release is a big one for Exo IDE! We are revealing new features and partnerships, all designed to make developers and their teams more productive. Here are the top 5 announcements for November.

1. New – Smart – Project Creation Wizard

This new layout gives you a single view of the configurable technologies and PaaS within Exo IDE. We have implemented logic within the wizard that maps the right technology to the right PaaS. Each PaaS supports different frameworks and APIs, and we filter out options to make your selection less error prone.

2. Save Minutes On Every Deploy: JRebel Integration!

We inked a partnership with ZeroTurnaround to integrate JRebel into our debugging runtime. JRebel is a JVM plug-in that makes it possible to see Java code changes instantly within a running application without re-deploying your artifacts. The time savings are significant for each compile-deploy-debug cycle, and now we’ve passed along those savings to you!

If you’ve picked a Java project at the first step of the wizard, you’ll notice the JRebel checkbox on the template selection box.

When the plug-in is active, we add an “Update Application” menu item to the run menu. Selecting this option will use the JRebel technique for deployment. Within our own labs we are seeing time savings of nearly a minute per deployment on some applications.

Find out more about the integration and Exo IDE’s architecture in our guest blog post on ZeroTurnaround blog.

3. More PaaS: AppFog Integration

Another month and another PaaS! AppFog adds a layer of flexibility on top of Cloud Foundry, allowing you to choose which Infrastructure provider you want to deploy to. We have added Ruby and Java support for AppFog.You can also easily deploy to AppFog’s private cloud PaaS by changing the deployment target URL.

4. Fixed-Width Font

We got a number of emails from users asking us to improve the readability & controls of fonts within the editor. We’ve listened to your feedback and have started answering your calls by including Adobe’s fixed-width font within this release. The Adobe font has a number of improvements that make reading letters and numbers that look similar easier. This includes items like zeros, O’s, I’s, and one’s. Give it a shot. We are hoping that this tweak helps us get rid of our glasses one day.

5. Team Development: JAR Publishing

With teams of any size, building modules that have a dependency relationship is a fundamental part of the process. Our own R&D team – which now uses Exo IDE to build Exo IDE – added this little nugget to facilitate faster development. First, they’ve added a Java JAR project type. JARs are standard library formats for Java. Second, developers can publish publish these libraries in a public maven repository that is accessible by other team members. Finally, other projects can reference these shared JARs within their maven project.

Tell Us What You Need

We need more of your feedback! We’re collecting feature requests on our new feedback page so please take a moment to contribute. You can also drop us an email at support@cloud-ide.com.

Have fun coding in the cloud.

Mark