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2011

Weekly Editorial

November 2011 Previous month Next month

Screenshot.pngAnother week and another update about the wonderful world of JBoss, with this week again we will highlight the latest, greatest JBoss project news!

 

JUDCon

JUDCon is coming to India in 2012!. Be sure to get your papers sumbitted, the deadline is fast approaching.

 

QCon

Mark Little and company where at QCon where he was speaking about JBossEverywhere again and with help from Kevin, also trying to reproduce the original JBoss World demo.

 

Devoxx

This last week was Devoxx in Antwerp, with a huge amout of talks on all things Java but also JBoss. Max Anderson posted his "Three Crazy Weeks" leading up to and including Devoxx.

 

Ceylon

We have some exciting news on Ceylon, the new JVM based programming language Gavin has been discussing on this blog. We now have a website, a blog and opened up all our source code.


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. In great JBoss tradition, it's not just about the specification or implementation, but also about the thriving community that's built up in only a few short months!

 

Now it is up to you to pop on over there, install the Eclipse IDE plugin and get started providing feedback to the team!

 

Releases

There have been some new released in the following projects:

  • Infinispan 5.1.0.BETA5 has just been the released with a few interesting additions and important fixes. As always, please keep the feedback coming. You can download the release from here and you get further details on the issues addressed in the changelog .
  • JBossWS 4.0.0.CR1 has been released at the end of last week and is currently available for download in binary and source distributions. The release covers both Native and Apache CXF integration stacks and comes with ahuge number of improvements, new features and fixes compared to the previous 3.4.1 final release. Have a look at the news page and the release notes [1][2] for further details.
  • It took a while to release it (due to other work that needed to be completed first), but the first release of our CDI Spring bridge, aka Seam Spring 3.1.0.Alpha1 is out. The details are on the module main page, and an explanation on how it works is on the documentation page.
  • Weld 1.1.4.Final release is out! Full release notes can be found here: https://issues.jboss.org/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=12310891&version=12318550.
  • Seam 3.1.0.Beta5 released. This will be the last beta release for Seam 3.1, the next release will be CR1 and our plan is to have it available by the end of this month.

 

 

Showcase

This section is a weekly spotlight on one or two pretty cool items out there in the JBoss community, just to let you know what you might be missing in the shadows.

  • an interesting rules project called Tohu
  • wondering what JBoss does with OSGi support, check out the project
  • Kosmos is a pretty neat looking monitoring suite
  • finally, I would be remiss if I did not mention the jBPM Migration project which will get you up and running on jBPM5 ;-)

 

Have a great week, enjoy your weekend and hopefully you will find some time to code!

It looks like it's my turn again to give everyone an update on the world of JBoss over the past week. Before I dive in, it's worth mentioning that next week's editorial should cover all things Devoxx related and since I was at QCon San Francisco during the week, I'm looking forward to hearing what everyone has to say too!

 

So we started the week with a quick look back at something that happened at JUDCon London earlier this month: the JBoss Asylum podcast, hosted as usual by Max and Emmanuel (I still expect them to open these podcasts in a very Robin Williams 'Gooooood morning JBoss' shout!) In this episode the team decided to do a panel session on Polyglot JBoss, i.e., what non-Java languages are we using or thinking of using in the future. As you can guess, this has a lot of relevance with JBoss Everywhere.

 

Since we're talking about JUDCon, it's worth mentioning or reminding everyone that the next event will be in just over two months time in Bangalore. If you haven't submitted something already then you should definitely get a move on, and of course don't forget to register and attend. Although we don't know yet who will be presenting, it's certain from what they've said this week that both Heiko Braun and Mark Proctor are hoping to be present and would make any JUDCon a place to be at!

 

Someone else who may be at JUDCon India is Kris Verlaenen, jBPM lead, and who this week had a lot to say about executable BPMN 2.0 and jBPM:

 

"Bruce Silver did a blog recently, wondering whether any tools already exist that truly support executable BPMN 2.0. He defines supporting executable BPMN 2.0 as not just following the graphical notation guidelines (that are probably not that different from BPMN 1.x), but also supporting the underling XML serialization. And not just the basic high-level elements, but also the details that are necessary to come to executable processes, like process data, data mappings, service interfaces, etc. I believe that jBPM satisfies these requirements!"

 

So check out what he has to say and also give jBPM a try. It's evolved a lot since jBPM 3 and is already a critical component by itself, but also within several other projects and platforms.

 

There were a couple of announcements this week related to tooling. The first was from Max, or rather Max commenting on an announcement from Google that they had finally open sourced their Eclipse plugin. As Max says: "With the open sourcing of the plugin we are looking forward to working even more closely with the Google team and the rest of the community on making the developer experience even more productive and an integrated part of Eclipse platform."

 

The second was from me about work we've been doing across the company on improving the developer experience for OpenShift, our public PaaS effort. There's a webinar on the subject tomorrow (21st of November), so register for that and hear from Max and others directly, as well as be able to ask your questions.

 

Finally we have the usual project announcements, including BoxGrinder 0.9.8, another CR for Hibernate Search 4.0.0, the first CR for Teiid 7.6, and last but by no means least, Bela talked about the jGroups 3.0.0.Final release.

 

OK, that's it for this week. It hasn't been as announcement-full as other weeks, but I suspect that's because everyone has been busy producing things to talk about next week!

We're a little late with this editorial review, but then we have been fairly busy. For a start, we've just announced the dates for the first APAC JUDCon, in Bangalore!If you haven't been to a JUDCon before then you can check out the previous events we've held in the US and Europe. Hopefully these will convince you to either submit something for consideration of the program committee, or register to attend. If you're interested in JBoss, (and let's face it, if you weren't then you probably wouldn't be reading this entry!), then JUDCon is the place to come and hear what's happening and help shape it too.

 

Another hugely significant announcement this week was from Max and the JBDS team, with the aptly named Shift Happens, 3.3 M4 release.

 

10824.png

As Max describes, when you first start it up you'll see the new JBoss Central "dashboard", which includes quick links to access common things such as the quickstarts, as well as the JBoss blog roll.

 

jbosscentraleditor.pngBut probably the biggest addition to this release is integration with OpenShift, so now you can develop and deploy directly within JBDS. Other new things in this release include Richfaces 4, colourised Forge, and improvements to JBoss OSGi integration. Lots to check out!

 

We had a few new releases this week, with Weld 1.1.3.Final, quickly followed by SP1(!), Hibernate Core 4.0.0.CR6 and Richfaces 4.1.0.M4.

 

There was quite a lot of transaction-based discussions this week too! First we had Galder from the Infinispan team talking about locking improvements in the 5.1.0.Beta4 release. As he puts it: "A hugely important lock acquisition improvement has been implemented that results in locks being acquired in only a single node in the cluster. This means that deadlocks as a result of multiple nodes updating the same key are no longer possible. Concurrent updates on a single key will now be queued in the node that 'owns' that key."

 

Then Mircea talked about the single lock owner feature in Infinispan: "The basic idea behind it is that, when writing to a key, locks are no longer acquired on all the nodes that own that key, but only on a single designated node (named "main owner")." If you read the entry from Mircea and the associated wiki page, you'll learn about how this can improve the performance of your Infinispan applications. He also wrote about how, if you're using pessimistic concurrency control, Infinispan will re-order your lock acquisitions to automatically avoid/reduce deadlocks. Very nice! In fact Mircea had a pretty busy week all told, with yet another blog entry on pessimistic transactions which were added in the 5.1 release.

 

Finally Jonathan had a few things to say about Spring and JPA configuration. In general people go to extremes to try to remove the need for transactions from their applications without actually understanding what it is that they're doing and how, at least in this case, they end up having done a lot of work for no good reason at all! I won't summarise the posting because it's well worth a read. However, it is worth quoting this: "You probably should not bother to invent a better mousetrap until you've determined that current mousetraps don't catch your mice. The imposed cost and complexity are definitively unnecessary."

 

OK, so that's it for this week. Hopefully you found this summary useful and we'll try and keep on schedule for next week

"Trick or Treat" is a shout heard often at this time of year and have we got some treats for you!  With many of the developers and Community members on the road, visiting parts of Europe to meet, present at conferences and have discussions on various JBoss technologies, there have been lots of fantastic opportunities for those lucky enough to attend.

 

JUDCon and JAX

 

The week started with a collaboration between JUDCon and JAX London; two conferences, held at the same venue, with overlapping streams.

 

The first day consisted of three streams covering

  • Rules, Workflow, SOA and EAI
  • OpenShift/Cloud
  • Cool Stuff

but things didn't stop there.  There were more goodies in the evening, after a break for drinks and dinner, when we had a live JBoss Community Asylum podcast followed by Lightning Talks, a Hackfest and more drinks.

 

The second day was shared with attendees of the JAX Conference and consisted of a stream covering JBoss Application Server 7 and its technologies.  We were also fortunate to have Dr. Mark Little presenting the JAX Keynote, discussing Red Hat's vision of "Middleware Everywhere".

 

You can find more information on the topics covered in these streams by looking through the conference agenda.

 

Many of the presentations will also make their way online and, when they do, we will include them in this editorial.

 

We already have

Expect to see more in the upcoming weeks.

 

EclipseCon Europe

 

EclipseCon Europe was the next stop on the trail, taking place in Ludwigsburg, Germany, and is the annual, European conference of the Eclipse open source community.

 

Two JBoss developers will be present

as well as another Red Hat colleague, Andrew Overholt, who will be presenting on IcedTea and IcedTea-Web, Hands on with the C/C++ IDE and Eclipse Linux Tools Project Update.

 

Java2Days

 

The final conference of the week, Java2Days, takes place in the beautiful city of Sofia in Bulgaria, and is a major Eastern European conference covering Java technology and development.

 

Two JBoss developers will be present

  • Andrew Lee Rubinger with two sessions on Arquillian and AS7
  • Lincoln Baxter III with two sessions on URL rewriting for the Web User and Rapid Development using JBoss Forge

 

Immutant is born

 

One of the most exciting announcements of the week was the birth of Immutant, a project which aims to do for Clojure what TorqueBox is doing for Ruby.  Jim Crossley made the original announcement and followed up with a good posting about Enterprise capabilities and why we believe they are important.

 

If you are interested in getting involved, helping to shape the integration of Clojure with the appserver, then please follow along on Twitter, join the mailing lists or jump on IRC.

 

jPBM Form Builder

 

If you are interested in keeping up with some of the advances in the jBPM Form Builder project then take a look at Mariano's posting, a follow-up covering the new Flexible Table UI component.

 

New Releases

 

As if all that wasn't enough to 'whet your appetite', here's a roundup of the new project releases

 

October 28th - Randall announced the release of Modeshape 2.6.0.Final

October 31st - Heiko announced the release of RHQ 4.2

October 31st - Jesper announced the release of IronJacamar 1.1.0.Alpha3

 

Upcoming Events

 

Keep an eye open for JBoss developers and Community members attending the following events.

 

November 14th-18th - Devoxx 2011 in Antwerp

November 16th-18th - QCon San Francisco 2011

 

Unfortunately both of these are now sold out but hopefully you already have your passes

 

That's all for this week, stay tuned for more updates from the Weekly Editorial.

 

Update 4th Nov: Added Link to Geoffrey's slides from JUDCon

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