At this time of year things traditionally slow down in the Northern Hemisphere; folks finish up their tasks and leave for their Summer vacation, have fun and recharge their batteries.  Traditionally, that is, until you consider JBoss and its Community.

JBoss AS 7 and Openshift

Less than a month ago we released JBoss AS 7 (#JBossAS7), the latest incarnation of our application server, but we didn't stop there.  Taking advantage of its blazingly fast startup time (less than 3 seconds), and its exceptionally small memory footprint, we have worked hard, alongside the OpenShift team, to support AS7 Platform as a Service (PaaS) deployments in the cloud.

The availability of AS7 in the cloud, running on OpenShift Express and OpenShift Flex, was announced by Dr. Mark Little in his blog post, "JBossAS 7.0 comes to OpenShift!"

This sounds interesting, right?  You want to know more about it?  Head over to the AS7 + OpenShift page for more information.  You will find lots there, including links to the following posts.

• "JBoss AS7 Configuration in OpenShift" by Scott Stark
• "Tracking Threads in JBoss AS7 in OpenShift" by Scott Stark
• "Differences between Express and Flex JBoss AS7 configurations" by Scott Stark
• "OpenShift Express/Flex Cartridge Comparision" by Scott Stark

Perhaps you want to see this in action?   Why not take a look at the following demos and see how easy, and quickly, you can create Java EE6 deployments in the cloud.

• "Getting Started with OpenShift Express on Fedora" by Tom Jenkinson
• "Getting Started with OpenShift Express on Mac" by Pete Muir
• "Getting started with OpenShift Express on Windows" by Michael Musgrove
• "An Introduction to JBossAS7 running in Express" by Dr. Mark Little
• "Using Java EE 6 with OpenShift Express running JBoss AS 7" by Pete Muir

Or attend the JBoss Platform as a Service Webinar on September 7th 2011, presented by Scott Stark and Tobias Kunze.

Remember to check back regularly as more posts and videos are planned.

Ceylon

Work on Ceylon is still continuing at speed, with Gavin writing another good post on Unary Types and covariance.  Lots of good discussion in the comments.

New Releases

Need something to do while on vacation?  Want some new toys to play with?  Why not take a look at some of the new releases coming from JBoss?  Two major releases come from the Infinispan and TorqueBox communities, check out

• August 5th - Infinispan 5.0.0.FINAL, what the world has been waiting for!
• August 9th - TorqueBox 1.1.1 released with faster rails boot time & better rails 3.1 support

and not forgetting the Hibernate Core, ModeShape and Drools communities which have all anounced their next beta releases

• August 3rd - Hibernate Core 4.0.0.Beta5 is out, check the release notes for details
• August 4th - ModeShape 2.6.0.Beta2 is now available
• August 9th - Drools 5.3.0.Beta1 is out with numerous updates.  See What is New and Noteworthy in Drools 5.3.0.Beta1 for more details

JBoss Events

The Newcastle JBug held an AS7 Hackathon this week, a hands on event exploring AS7 and how to deploy applications.  The London JBug will be hosting a similar event (JBoss AS 7 Hack-a-thon) on August 30th.

The Seam 3 team are hosting an online Hack Night in their IRC channel (#seam-dev), 2200 UTC on August 11th.

That's all for this week, enjoy your Summer vacation.