Welcome to the first regular weekly roundup of what's been happening in the world of JBoss. As editors, our attempt here is not to replace the other streams of information that flow from JBoss projects and people, but to act as an aggregator for some of the ones that we believe are worth paying attention to. As a result this will often be a subjective view, so you may see some things focused on here that you wouldn't normally notice and others may be missing. Hopefully we can please most of the people most of the time!

So let's jump in and look back over the last week:

• Ben Browning reported on the TorqueBox's rapid progress towards their goal of making it simpler to consume the project. As Ben shows, they've made the entire TorqueBox distribution simpler to install as a gem and once installed there's even a new TorqueBox command for deploying, undeploying and running. And for those Ruby folks who use TorqueBox with RVM to manage multiple instances of Ruby (who doesn't?!), this new gem approach means there's no longer RVM specific instructions. If you're already a TorqueBox user then you probably saw Ben's post, but if not then check it out and also check out TorqueBox!
• The Infinispan team have been pulling out all the stops again recently, with Galder talks about the optimisation work they've been doing around Hibernate 4.0.0.Beta1 to improve performance when Infinispan is used as a second level cache. Now not strictly from the Infinispan team, but definitely related, TorqueBox's very own Lance Ball has also announced the release of the Infinispan Ruby client: this client gives access to a remote Infinispan data grid utilizing the Hot Rod binary protocol.
• Mark Proctor has been musing about alternative realities and specifically what might have happened if he and the Drools project hadn't joined JBoss. Not a technical presentation by any means, but Mark's always worth reading.
• Gavin has been talking more about Ceylon, this time about type inference. If you haven't read any of the other articles that Gavin's written around different aspects of Ceylon then you can find them all here. Even if you've no interest in learning a new language you'll find some interesting gems of knowledge within them.
• This week we've also seen a lot more about the JBoss World 2011 Keynote, with the engineers behind the demo getting together to produce a lot of material to dig into what was only hinted at back in May. For a start there's a dedicated Asylum Podcast, a blog post by Manik on the role Infinispan played, Jay talking about how RichFaces played a key part and more on the underlying vision of JBoss Everywhere.
• We've seen a lot from the Hibernate team this week, with Hibernate Core 4.0.0Beta1 and HibernateCore 3.6.5Final being released, as well as Hibernate Validator 4.2.0CR1 going out the door.
• Some of the team have been (will be) out and about, including Mark Little at a couple of JBUGs, and Marek Goldmann at Confitura where he presented yet more on TorqueBox, messaging and CDI! Unfortunately it seems that Mark Proctor and some of his team are stuck in sunny Rio de Janeiro because of a volcano (well that's his excuse and he's sticking to it!) So their roadshow to Argentina is on hold for now.

Well that's it for this week's roundup!