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!