Skip navigation
2011

Screenshot.png

 

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:

 

 

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!

 

 

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!

v2xk.jpg   ik82.jpg

A lot of interesting things happened since last week. Let us do a quick roundup:

 

  • We knew that HornetQ was fast, but now it's faster than ever: the HornetQ team has published a blog entry about the record performance of HornetQ: a whopping 8 million messages per second, against the industry-standard SpecJMS2007 benchmark. The best news? While the tests have been executed against JBoss EAP 5.1.2, HornetQ is powering JBoss AS7 as well - so look forward to the same great performance there.
  • If you plan to migrate an existing Seam 2 project to AS7,  you should check Marek Novotny's blog post. You can see how older applications can also benefit of the goodness of AS7, with minimal changes.
  • For Richfaces users: Lukas Fryc has posted an excellent overview of two examples of using Richfaces with JBoss AS7. And actually more: if you read it closely, you will also learn how to create JMS queues using the CLI and also through your application's code.
  • JBoss AS7 also a great runtime for OSGi bundles, which was the main focus of an excellent webinar by Thomas Diesler and David Bosschaert. If you are interested, in it, but missed it - you can always watch the recording of the demo.
  • The JBoss Asylum has a new podcast. This time, the guests are Mark Proctor and Michael Anstis. The main topic is Drools with its new 5.2 release, but the recent developments in the Java EE world got their share of attention too.
  • It's busy times for TorqueBox - and members of the team and community spread the word about it in a variety of places. And if you want to hear about it yourself, you can listen to Bob McWhirther's interview, explaining how Torquebox allows you to love Ruby on Rails and get the performance of Java EE.
  • Gavin King continues to expand his preview on Ceylon with new articles, about the current progress, and the reasoning behind some design decisions such as the ellimination of the do-while loop as well as the handling of sequences and sequenced parameters.
  • A few new releases have come out this week:
    • Manik Surtani announces Infinispan 5.0.CR8 - and now, for the final release
    • Gail Badner and Steve Eversole announce two new versions of Hibernate. Hibernate 3 has gotten a new maintenance release in 3.6.6.Final, while Hibernate 4 moves one step further towards a final release, with 4.0.0.Beta4.
  • Participating in you local JBUG is a great way to keep track of the latest developments and get in touch with the comunity and JBoss developers.  So, what happened close to you? Last week:
    • The Sydney JBUG has received an introduction on AS7 by Stuart Douglas
    • The Japan JBUG has announced an upcoming talk on AS7 next week

jbossas7_fast.png

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:

 

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

android_tweetstream2_july_14_2011.png

  • jBPM BPMN2 Web Designer: I am personally a fan of all things "declarative", specifically when it comes to BPM or workflow.  The jBPM & Drools teams continue to demonstrate how open source will change the very nature of IT AND business.  Hyperbole on my part?  Check out Develop Complex jBPM Processes in Guvnor - design BPMN 2.0 processes, graphically, right in your browser by Tihomir. 
    Guvnor_BPMN2_Designer2.png
    Make sure to watch his HD video - seeing is believing. http://vimeo.com/26126678
  • In addition, Marian Buenosayres has been blogging about a new jBPM Form Builder.  This is an absolutely fantastic addition to jBPM project.  Many thanks Marian for getting this moving, thousands of jBPM fans look forward to future jBPM Form Builder blogs, screenshots and hopefully a video in the future. :-)
  • The White Rabbit (JBoss AS7 CR1) has been spotted - some fantastic content has trickled out related to the new AS7 - if you only have a few moments to start your learning of how to get started with AS7, I suggest watching this demonstration video captured from the Jason Greene Webinar.  There is a LOT more coming, make sure to follow @jbossdeveloper and watch for hashtag #JBossAS7 in the twitterverse.
  • IronJacamar 1.0.0 Released!  Our implementation of Java Connector Architecture - easier development via annotated POJO-based services, including a fast embedded environment to allow for fast turnaround automated testing.   I will not even attempt to repeat all the major enhancements listed in the blog post - go read it.
  • Did you know that a web profile focused application server like JBoss AS 7.0 (again, more to come on this topic soon) still has some more advanced features like JMS and JAX-WS?  Alessio of the JBossWS team published a small article on using JAX-WS with AS7.
  • Finally, GWT (Google Web Toolkit) is widely used here at JBoss, if you watch Tiho's jBPM BPMN2 Designer video then you will get to see one the showcase examples in action - Drools Guvnor.    Another example is the JBoss AS7 Admin Console (thank Heiko!) and it can be seen in Brian Stansberry's Webinar. Fast forward to minute 40 for a quick demo of the new admin console.  GWT is also being used by our RHQ team and Mazz has had some nice tips on best practices with GWT. 
    http://planet.jboss.org/view/post.seam?post=telling_gwt_to_ignore_certain_classes
    http://planet.jboss.org/view/post.seam?post=detaching_hibernate_objects_to_pass_to_gwt

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.

http://community.jboss.org/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/102-16967-7-16616/helpdesk.png

  • 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!

Filter Blog

By date:
By tag: