It's official now: Ceylon is close to it's first beta and the team have launched the site at Devoxx. Of course we heard about Ceylon earlier this year but the curtain really came up last week. For a project that really only took off just after I took over from Sacha, Gavin and the team have done a great job. And in great JBoss tradition, I'm not just talking about the specification or implementation, but also about the thriving community that's built up in only a few short months! It's is yet another project that I wish I had more time to commit to it, so have only been able to help on the specification intermittently and only then much earlier this year, but as they say, every little helps (no pun intended!)

I'm really excited by Ceylon and what it might mean for other things we're doing in Cloud and JBossEverywhere. So expect to hear more about this effort in the coming months, because just like Java, it's going to continue to evolve. And can we please stop these "my language is better than your language" arguments? There's room in this evolving polyglot world for a few more, even if just to allow people to stretch their mental legs and see what works and what doesn't. Everyone is entitled to their opinions and reasoned arguments are always allowed; but flamewars, especially if they're subjectively based, don't help anyone.

Onward!

So you've decided to develop for the cloud and your next decision is the language. Well I've already mentioned why Java is probably the best choice for you, especially if you want reliability, security and other enterprise capabilities. But as developers we all know that whilst these things are important, it's how you pull them together into an application that makes an incredible difference. It doesn't matter if you've got the best framework around if it takes a rocket scientist to be able to understand it or develop anything with it. This is where tooling comes in. And once again Java helps you here, because over the past decade no single language has seen the kind of explosion in developer-oriented tooling. Now I use the word "tooling" to cover a wide range of things. Whether it's IDEs such as Eclipse or IntelliJ, utilities to facilitate building your code e.g., ant, maven or Ivy, automatic code coverage tools like EMMA, or testing tools like junit or the DTF, you'll find them and much more in the Java ecosystem. You can say what you like about the language and it's future, but anything that eventually comes to replace it either has to leverage these things too or replace them, which is going to be quite a Herculean task.

Anyway, back to the cloud. These tools grew up because there was a need for them and naturally developing in the cloud doesn't necessarily remove that need. Yes we hear a lot about how cloud can simplify the life of a developer, but if you are a Java developer and it doesn't integrate with your favourite tools then your life is probably not simplified at all! We announced OpenShift back in May and then integration with AS7 several months ago. But despite the fact that at that time we did a lot of ancillary work around this to make it really simple to develop your applications, and we've done further work adding things like Arquillian, there were some important pieces missing. For a start it was originally very command-line driven, which is fine if like me you grew up using Unix and still use emacs, but is perhaps a slight burden for others.

So in the interim along with making a series of other improvements to the OpenShift runtime, the team have been working to simplify the life of a developer. The ultimate aim is to blur and then remove the distinction between cloud and non-cloud development, or at least as much as makes sense because at times you really do need to understand the differences. And when I say "the team" it's important to realise that once again, as with the AS7 effort, this has been work conducted by people across several distinct teams, including the OpenShift developers and JBoss engineers. I don't want to spoil the surprise too much because if you come to the webinar you will learn so much more from the engineers who have been involved with this effort, but what we are announcing in a few days time is a complete develop-to-test-to-deploy (d2t2d?) approach, including one of the most popular testing implementations and IDEs. And it's also worth noting that despite the fact I've concentrated on Java in this posting, you'll see that it actually goes well beyond a single language!

In conclusion, you'll find that not only was OpenShift the first Enterprise PaaS with EE6 support, simplifying development for the cloud and helping to shape where others had to follow, but now we are continuing that effort. And the emphasis is on "continuing": there is much much more to come from the teams in the coming months. I wish I could hint at some of them, but that wouldn't be fair to tease you or our competition So all I will say is watch this space and if there are things you'd like us to concentrate on then let us know through the usual avenues! Oh and enjoy the webinar!

Update: ok, so I wrote this entry on a flight and it took me a little longer to publish than I expected. In the meantime we announced some of this, so the surprise is already out there You should still come to the webinar though! Tries these links out in the meanwhile:

Jenkins + OpenShift How-To Blog:

https://www.redhat.com/openshift/blogs/build-test-and-deploy-using-industry-standard-jenkins-on-express

Jenkins + OpenShift How-To Video:

https://www.redhat.com/openshift/videos/build-test-and-deploy-using-industry-standard-jenkins-on-express

JBoss Tools + OpenShift How-To Blog:

https://www.redhat.com/openshift/blogs/getting-started-with-the-openshift-eclipse-plug-in-for-java-applications-on-the-cloud

JBoss Tools + OpenShift How-To Video:

https://www.redhat.com/openshift/blogs/deploying-java-apps-to-the-cloud-with-the-openshift-eclipse-plug-in