Another week and another update about the wonderful world of JBoss, a community that is absolutely bubbling with activity. Every week we try to bring you an overview of the latest, greatest JBoss project news, keeping you up to speed on the width and breadth of the innovation being done in our house.

JBoss AS 7

As of late there has been lots of noise and activity around the announcements of JBoss AS 7. This continues with another behind the scenes look at Why is JBoss AS 7 so fast?

Ceylon

Gaven King has unleashed another insightful post to update us on Ceylon's progress, which led to a bit of a discussion that you might find interesting in the comments below the article. This brought us the follow-up article that answers some of the questions regarding the design of Ceylon. There was also a nice overview of Modules in Ceylon. It remains a very interesting and hot topic both inside the JBoss communities and in the Java community as a whole.

Drools / jBPM

Michael Anstis posted a few of the changes to Guvnor's Asset Viewer. Mark Proctor will be at Rule Fest 2011 in October a premier Rules conferences of the year. Also of note, Mario Fusco joins the Drools team as a core engine developer.

JBoss events

Events coming to the area near you that have been getting a lot of Twitter attention are the following:

• JBoss One Day Talk in Munich, Germany to be held on October 13th.
• JBUG in London, UK focusing on Infinispan, Data Grids and Cloud Storage was held on July 26th.
• JBUG London is organizing a JBoss AS 7 Hack-a-thon on August 30th.
• Dan Allen (@mojavelinux) is at OSCon 2011 in my old stomping grounds Portland, Oregon and actively reporting on Twitter.
• Toby Crawley is also at OSCon 2011 talking in a session on TorqueBox - The beauty of Ruby with the power of Java.

Showcase

I thought it might be nice to put the spotlight on one or two of what I think are pretty cool projects out there in the JBoss community, just to let you know what you might be missing in the shadows. These are not mainstream components, but are small efforts to provide you with some ease in your daily JBoss development life. Take the time to stop by their corner of the world, read about their efforts and maybe give a helping hand!

• Wise project (invoking webservices easily, usable as base for zero-code webservice invocation)
• jBPM Migration Project (tooling to help migrate jBPM3 users to jBPM5 and BPMN2)
• JBoss OSGi (just released v1.0.0)

Easy listening for your summer vacations

Looking for something a little different to listen to during your vacation? How about the JBoss Asylum podcasts, you can catch up on all the news in the JBoss community while sitting in the sun. Another good one to catch is over on This America Life entitled When Patents Attack.

For the rest of you out there, enjoy your summer vacations and code on (at the beach?) like these guys!

JBoss AS7 goes Final on July 12th 2011 - You will love JBoss AS7

I fully expect a global drop in coffee consumption for enterprise Java developers and administrators because there will be less wait time, less coding and you now have a vastly easier to manage & deploy application server.    More developer/administrator productivity means more time spent on adding business value.   You can join the #JBossAS7 conversation on theserverside.com.

• Faster startup (< 3 secs) and faster hot deployment means less time waiting to see your changes live.
• Smaller ASs - memory footprint means more memory available for the hungry Eclipse on your desktop workstation. If you are like many JBoss users, you likely need to start dozens if not hundreds of application server instances in your production environment to meet your ever growing end-user demand.
• EE6 programming model means a POJO with annotations model for transactional components, RESTful endpoints and the glue code between the UI tier & middle tier disappears.
• CLI - command line interface, forget Twiddle, the new CLI can be used to touch anything available for tuning and configuration inside the application server. Other administration & management interfaces include a new Web console (based on GWT), a native Java API and a HTTP API that supports JSON payloads (yes, build your own JavaScript-based admin solution).

Make sure to check out the articles listing for more details about JBoss AS7.

• Hibernate Users: Hibernate continues to be one of the most popular and pervasive open source projects around the globe.  Hibernate 4 ships as part of JBoss AS7 and Team Hibernate/JPA put together a nice article on what is new and now available. 
• Spring Users: if you are a Spring user and wish to learn more about how to bring those old Spring applications to AS7 then make sure to follow Marius's blog on the topic.
• Switchyard Users: If you need routing, transformation, Camel's declarative EIP capabilities and other SOA-oriented functionality then check out Switchyard's move to the JBoss AS7 architecture.

VIdeo killed the radio star and the amount of video production by the JBoss team has exploded over the last few months at www.vimeo.com/jbossdeveloper.

Key videos published in the last couple of weeks include:

• Jason's - Perl & JBoss AS7 CLI
• Tiho's - Developing jBPM BPMN2 Processes in Guvnor
• Pete's - How to create a new JBoss AS7 Project using a Java EE6 focused Maven Archetype
• Lincoln's - $#@!'ing Fast - Seam Forge and JBoss AS 7
• and Lincoln's - JBoss Speed Tests: AS 7 vs. Firefox

Wish to follow the twitterverse action for #JBossAS7 but without actually having a Twitter account?  Check out our JSF2 + RichFaces4 based Tweetstream demonstration that runs on OpenShift at bit.ly/tweetstream2

We're slightly later with this week's edition, but a lot of that's to do with the time we spent at JAXConf (where we won the award for the most innovative Java company!) and all of the work we've been putting into the upcoming JBossAS 7 release! But no more delay, so let's get on with it:

• As usual the Infinispan team have been hitting the ball out of the park, including some significant performance improvements where transactions are concerned (who knew that Synchronizations could be used instead of an XAResource - well, everyone in the JBossTS team of course!) Mircea reports between 20% and 40% improvement in performance, which is pretty good. Mircea's been very busy too, having just been to Jazoon to give yet another Infinispan talk. And Manik also managed to drive the team to another release candidate for the 5.0 version of Infinispan! And talking about transactions, Mark (yes, that's me) finally got round to talking about the Software Transactional Memory work that has been going on for a while, using the TXOJ framework that's part of JBossTS. Hey, as editor I'm allowed a little judicious self-focus once in a while
• The BoxGrinder team ground out another release (OK, pardon the pun!) with 0.9.3, as reported by Marc Savy. Lots of nice improvements in this release, including a number of bug fixes. Expect to see and hear a lot more from the team as we move further into the Cloud with JBoss.
• Dimitris wrote up a piece of the first release candidate for JBossAS 7,  called White Rabbit, (hopefully named after the Wonderland version and not the song!) As he says, the 7.0 release will be based around the Java EE 6 Web Profile, with some additions like JCA and JAX-RS, with the 7.1 release being the full EE6 profile. Of course once we had the White Rabbit release of JBossAS 7, hot on the heels of that Max announced the release of JBoss Tools 3.3 M2 (should've been called the Alice release if you ask me!) The focus is on JBossAS 7 and EE6, with more pronounced use of technologies such as JAX-RS and improved support for CDI with more complete support for Seam Solder. In fact this week has seen a lot of activity around JBossAS 7, with Kabir blogging on how to get started with CR1 in a matter of minutes (look out for more articles like this over the coming days and weeks). There's a lot to read in the article, but one sentence stands out: "JBoss Application Server 7.0.0 started in 2750ms". Not bad!
• Another project that's been hitting its stride lately is the SwitchYard team. This week Tom has been talking about the integration of CDI Services and JAXB annotations, to automatically transform between JAXB types and XML namespaces. Definitely worth a look, since SwitchYard is our next generation ESB and we'll be hearing more from the team soon around Cloud too. Not to be outdone, David Ward introduces us to a critical component of any ESB or SOA infrastructure: the BPM (or workflow) capabilities. As David shows, and as is illustrated below, the team have been working to integrate jBPM 5 with the ESB. The combination of BPM and SOA is critical to many integration scenarios, so this is a major milestone! Kris, the jBPM lead, agrees.

• We've seen and heard a lot about the future of JBoss middleware, including the keynote and JBossEverywhere. But it seems that for some people it was still a bit too abstract or vague. So we saw some significant improvements in that message this week, with a two part article called Taking a Stand! Part one is really laying the ground for the message, by looking at some statements that have been made by others (out competitors) in their attempts to place a stake in the ground for the future of Java and middleware. But as pointed out, none of them are really seeing the bigger picture, which is neither Cloud nor mobile, but a combination of the two and so much more: ubiquitous computing! Which leads us neatly to the second article, where the need for Enterprise Ubiquitous Computing is stated along with what you can expect from Red Hat/JBoss in this space. Since the combined articles are about 75K in size, don't expect us to summarise them more here

Well that's it for this week. Of course there were many other things going on in the wonderful world of JBoss, but we have to keep these things short and snappy. But hopefully this will whet your appetite and you'll check out all of the syndicated blogs we have and other news that happens on JBoss.org. So until next time ... enjoy!