When you open JBDS, the first thing that you see is a dialog to select the workspace (the directory tree) that you want to use. If the workspace that you select does not exist, JBDS will create it for you.

It's a good idea to keep your workspace separate from the directory in which you installed JBDS so that there is no chance of updates to JBDS affecting your workspace or vice versa. For our work in this book, we'll use /opt/workspace.

At this point, JBDS displays its welcome screen. You can select any of the icons displayed here for general tutorial/introductory information on JBDS. Note that the welcome screen is only displayed by default the first time that you run JBDS. However, it doesn't go away. It's always available under the JBDS help menu. For now, close the welcome screen by selecting the x icon next to the screen's Welcome title.

JBDS is organized into eclipse "perspectives". Each perspective consists of a set of tools and visual layouts to assist you in specific tasks. The default perspective when you open JBDS is the SEAM (http://seamframework.org/) perspective.

For our work with JBDS, we want to use the Java perspective. Select Window | Open Perspective | Java:

Here's what the the Java perspective looks like:

Now it's time to set up the JBoss ESB runtime in JBDS. This is a one-time task.