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2012

Mark Little's Blog

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There's really not a lot more I can say to describe how happy I am that we've just released AS7.1 and it's fully EE6 certified! The entire team has worked flat out for months (years!) to achieve this and not only have they done it, but they've done it with style! I'm not going to say much more because there are a plethora of blog posts out there already telling you all about AS7.1 so you should go take a look for yourselves. All I will add is that this is the start of the final lap for the EAP 6 release, so it won't be long before we'll be offering a fully supported EE6 platform to our customers as well as the community. Just watch this space!

 

Oh and for those who didn't see Jason's original email announcing the release, here it is:

 

Hi Everyone,

 

I am extremely excited to announce that JBoss AS 7.1.0.Final

"Thunderbird" has been released. This is the first JBoss AS release to

be certified under the Java EE6 Full profile. On top of that it brings

numerous management, security, and clustering enhancements. Altogether

this was a grueling release with 590 Jira issues resolved (we only set

out to do 311!), which brings us to a combined total of 1465 issues

resolved since 7.0.2.Final!

 

So, a very large thank you is in order to all of our contributors who

had a part in this release. All of those hours working around the clock

to make this happen have finally paid off!

 

Check out the extensive release notes here:

https://community.jboss.org/wiki/AS710FinalReleaseNotes

 

As always, you can download it here:

https://www.jboss.org/author/jbossas/downloads.html

 

Thanks, and as a mentor once said,

 

Onward!

It seems that my latest article on the polyglot evolution that you're seeing at JBoss/Red Hat has generated some interest, particularly the idea that this is about continuing to support Java in a major way. Well I took a few day off recently (Valentine's weekend) and got to thinking about why this seems news when I've been saying the same thing for a long time? The only conclusion I could come to is that maybe I've been using the wrong approach when describing it in the past. So to compliment what I've already written I put together another entry, this time over on my personal blog. I'll copy a few snippets here, but if you're interested in knowing more about how and why we're approaching this polyglot, go over and read the whole entry.

 

"This Polyglot movement is a reality and it's unlikely to go away any time soon. Fast forward a few years we may see a lot less languages around than today, but they will have been influenced strongly by their predecessors. I do believe that we need to make a distinction between the languages and the platforms that they inevitably spawn. And in this regard I think we need to learn from history now and quickly: unlike in the past we really don't need to reimplement the entire stack in the next cool language."

 

"I think the kind of approaches we're seeing with, say, TorqueBox or Immutant, where services implemented in one language are exposed to another in a way that makes them appear as if they were implemented natively, makes far more sense. Let's not waste time rehashing things like transactions, messaging and security, but instead concentrate on how best to offer these capabilities to the new polyglot movement that makes them fit in as first class citizens."

I mentioned the other day that Java is still incredibly important to us as a technology and community. But what about the area of standards? Well as our representative on the Executive Committee, that is something which is never far from my mind. I've spoken many times in the past about how we think the state of Java standardisation should be improved. Whether it's in the combined interviews Mark Proctor and I did for Red Monk, on the DZone Tech Chats, or on a panel session at QCon, the message is clear: the future of Java is tied critically to the future of the way in which it is governed. We're not the only ones to call attention to the often less than open ways in which the Java Community Process has been managed in the past; even Oracle did so prior to their acquisition of Sun. However, things have been improving and although the rate of change is often frustratingly slow, at least it is typically moving in the right direction.

 

As Scott mentioned last year, JSR 348 made some changes to the process that many of us have been asking for a while and we have been practicing in the JSRs that we lead. This isn't the end of changes to that process: as announced at JavaOne last year there is now the intention to merge the ME and SE/EE Executive Committees. Scott has a reference to the current discussions on that effort in his latest blog, so I encourage everyone to take a look and raise any concerns or questions through the appropriate channels. But this isn't going to be the end. For a start there's still a lot of work that we need to do on the processes, including further simplifications and more openness. Then it is likely that we'll need to look again at the merged EC: does a 25 seat body work well, for instance. So there's still a long road to travel before we reach our destination. However, I am hopeful that we'll get there and that it won't take us another 7 years.

Unless you're still recovering from Christmas, you can't fail to have noticed that we're doing quite a bit of work with languages other than Java. Those include Ruby, via TorqueBox, Clojure with Immutant, C/C++ in Blacktie, Scala in Infinispan, Ceylon and my own person favourite Erlang (ok, that's still more a pet project for me than anything else). But does this mean that we're turning our backs on Java? No, of course it doesn't! If anything it shows our continued commitment to Java and the JVM because all of these approaches to polyglot leverage our Java projects and platforms. I've said on a number of occasions that the future of middleware isn't to reinvent core services and capabilities (check out my Future of Middleware presentation, for instance). There's also a lot more that we have done so far and will be doing in the future that should show we're as committed to Java today as we've ever been:

 

 

The links are to some things I've said over the past 12 months, but the entire JBoss team has been saying and presenting on similar topics. So I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to find those references.

 

In conclusion, for all those people who believe that we're ignoring Java, I have to say that nothing could be further from our minds.

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