Yet another week has gone by and the high-octane train that is JBoss and its community continues at a blistering pace.  As usual we try to bring you the best of the best, an update on the activities in and around JBoss and its community.

JBoss at JavaOne

JavaOne is next week and the "JBoss Everywhere" motto has never been more evident than seeing the phenomenal number of JBoss speakers in attendance.  We have 20 presentations over four days (seriously, check out the schedule) and have had our very own Dan Allen highlighted on the Featured Speakers carousel.

Of course that is not all that we are doing during Java One. We have three full days of presentations in our mini-theater at the JBoss booth (#5502) where we will be covering numerous topics such as JBoss Application Server 7, OpenShift, Infinispan and more.  Checkout the full list to see what is on and remember, these presentations are given by the folks who are behind the many projects at JBoss.  If you have any questions that need answers, want to give feedback about any of the JBoss projects and/or platforms, or just want to chat with the people who know the details then take a trip down to the booth.

As if the presentations were not enough, we are also giving you the chance to win the latest fashion craze heading out of Milan.  That's right, you could be the proud owner of a limited edition JBoss soccer jersey .  Just head along to the booth and enter the raffle for your chance to win.

JBoss parties at JavaOne

As you know JBoss loves to party and this year is no exception.  We will be hosting the “Lightning in the Cloud” JBoss party on Tuesday, October 4th, starting at 5:30pm PST. The party will be held at the historic “Slide” at 430 Mason St (between Derby St and Geary St), adjacent to Union Square where we will have food, drinks, music and a great crowd.

Remember to reserve your party invitation by registering now, then go by the JBoss booth, #5502, to pick up the invitation.

Transactions within TorqueBox

One of the most exciting developments this week has to be the announcement from the TorqueBox team about their support for XA transactions within Ruby, further enhancing the integration between Ruby and the JBoss Application Server.  The team has come up with an elegant integration, something that is not easy to do when transactions are involved.

If you want to find out how this affects your MessageProcessors, JMS messages, Background tasks or manipulation of your ActiveRecords then take a look at Jim's excellent post.

Forge, EE6 and OpenShift Express

Are you interested in deploying EE6 applications to the cloud?  Do you think it is hard to achieve?  Think again!

In this video Lincoln walks us through the creation of an EE6 application using Forge and how this can then be deployed to OpenShift Express.

Lincoln starts with the generation of a simple web application then, having shown how to deploy this to the cloud, he continues to demonstrate the flexibility of Forge by extending the application to

• generate a persistent entity representing a user
• generate web pages to manipulate the entities
• generate a REST endpoint to expose manipulation of the entities

All of this is achieved using Forge, deployed to the cloud, takes less than 10 mins, and doesn't have an editor in sight.  Very impressive.

The Future of Seam

Seam has been going through a number of changes of late and, as a consequence, rumors are starting to circulate about its future.  Shane has written a wonderful article discussing Seam and its future direction, its goal of uniting the CDI developer community and its aim of fostering innovation through the encouragement and incubation of new ideas and improvements.

If you are interested in Seam then it is a must-read.

Modular Serialization

Jason has taken some time to describe the inherent problems of using Java Serialization within a modular environment.  He describes a number of common problem cases and covers a number of possible solutions.  It is a very good article and one that should not be missed.

JBoss Portlet Bridge passes JSR-329 TCK

Wesley has recently announced that, after a lot of effort, JBoss Portlet Bridge has passed the JSR-329 TCK and has been approved by Oracle.  Congratulations to all involved in the process.

If you want to judge Wesley's excitement then take a look at the video he provides by way of a comparison

RichFaces and Mobile Web Frameworks

If you are interested in mobile development and RichFaces then you will definitely want to follow Wesley's series on RichFaces development for mobile applications.  He continues the series with his second article, covering  bookmarkable URLs and how to use the back button from within AJAX driven pages.

Developer Notes on the JBoss AS7 Console

The JBoss AS7 management console, as many of you may know, is implemented using GWT.  In this article Heiko discusses the implications of the detyped model used within the application server and the strongly typed model required by the GWT components, introducing some of the building blocks used to convert between the two representations.

Envers in JBossAS

Envers is a hibernate core module which enables the auditing of modification to your persistent entities with the addition of a simple annotation, now bundled within JBoss AS 7.0.2.  Adam has written a post describing how to integrate Envers into your application and includes a small JSF/CDI application by way of a demonstration.

SwitchYard and Forge

Keith has created a great video showcasing the integration between SwitchYard and Forge.  If you are interested in either of these projects then check out his post for the video link.

OpenBlend and SIOUG

OpenBlend is a one-day OpenSource conference held at the beautiful Ljubljana Castle in Slovenia.  Having had time to recover from the celebrations, Ales has now found some time to blog about the conference and his subsequent “CDI and Arquillian” workshop, with Marko, at SIOUG.

New Releases

Always keen to bring you new and exciting developments, here is a round up of the project releases that have happened in the last week

September 29th - Hibernate Core 4.0.0.CR4 is out, check out the release notes for details.

September 25th - Drools 5.3.0.CR1 is out, check the new and noteworthy changes.

As well as these candidate releases we also have

September 29th - Hibernate Search 4.0 beta 2 is released, removing the dependency on hibernate core.  Checkout Emmanuel's post and read the Migration Guide before updating.

Upcoming JBoss Events

The SoftShake IT conference will be happening in Geneva on October 3rd & 4th.  If you are attending then make sure to catch Galder's presentations on Data Grids.

JBoss In Bossa, the JBug:Brasil Conference, will be happening on October 8th.  Make sure to attend if you are in the region.

JUDCon 2011:London will be happening on October 31st and November 1st, leading up to the JAX London event.  If you are going to JAX, or will be in the area, then get yourself down to JUDCon. This is another great opportunity to learn from the source.

That's all for this week, please check back next week for more updates.  If you are attending Java One or SoftShake then have fun.

JBoss Everywhere - geographically speaking

I suspect many folks see "JBUG" and determine that must be tied to a jira or bugzilla entry. Well that is not the case, JBUG stands for JBoss User Group and they are popping up around the globe.  Recent startups are Neuchatel over in Switzerland, Washington DC and Milan, Italy. As well as many other speaking events. Look for the JBoss team at JavaOne, Devoxx and all your favorite developer conferences.

TorqueBox Everywhere

The TorqueBox core team and community are showing up everywhere.  Most JBoss'ers are frequent flyers - always participating in local community meetings around the world but the TorqueBox team sets a high standard.

Have you seen TorqueBox in the cloud with OpenShift?

Or TorqueBox in Brazil?

Or TorqueBox at the Ruby Hoedown?

Or TorqueBox in Ljubljana, Slovenija...or coming to London

Bring us your Ruby on Rails friends and give TorqueBox a try and check out configuring with Ruby instead of YAML.

JBoss invades Toronto Island

Big things happening in Toronto this week, the jboss.org developer framework teams (Seam, RichFaces, Errai, Snowdrop, Forge, Arquillian) along with their QA and Support teams are meeting on Toronto Island at Artscape Gibraltar Point.  A true retreat in every sense of the word, to plan for the next generation of JBoss sponsored developer facing framework & tools.   The energy and innovative thinking have been fantastic.  I cannot yet describe any of these ideas as they will be communicated at the appropriate time but let's just say the future looks bright.   And this from making a bunch of software engineers share air mattresses and a common washroom!

JUDCon London Agenda

JUDCon London is October 31st through November 1st and the agenda is now posted.

This is a great opportunity to spend time with members of the core JBoss engineering team representing AS (Application Server), jBPM, Drools, Infinispan, Arquillian and Hibernate.

And JBoss online via jboss.org/webinars

Scott Stark & Tobias Kunze gave a demo-filled live session on September 7th.  If you are interested in seeing JBoss "in the cloud" as a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) via OpenShift, please check out the recording (http://vimeo.com/28828146).  This is a great session to get the overview of both OpenShift Express and OpenShift Flex - all JBoss, focused on Java EE 6, ready to go, try it today.

The next JBoss Developer Webinar is on HTML5, make sure to register soon for a space in this session (www.jboss.org/webinars).

RichFaces CDK Hello World

RichFaces 4, a AJAX/RIA component set for JSF 2, includes a Component Development Kit - CDK, that you can use to create new, extend existing or wrap 3rd party UI controls/widgets/components.  This is a tool that can be used by the Java EE developers who wish to create their own custom components to be reused in their own projects.   Brian has not been here to long but as a long time community member he has hit the ground running.

JBoss Grows

The JBoss core team is always growing and we normally just forget to publicly call out those individuals who have join the open source movement.   That is a short coming on our part as open source is all about the community and the community is all about the individuals who give back to that community. I also welcome Jonathan Fuerth to the JBoss team.  We expect great things out of the Toronto-based Errai team!

Errai was a key element in our keynote demo (http://vimeo.com/25258416), enabling the normally server-side CDI custom eventing capability to reach the browser - real-time push - it is the future. 

JGroups Pub-Sub with Bela Ban

JGroups is a key element of JBoss, it is the underlying layer that makes clustering and technologies like Infinispan (distributed data grid & cache) possible.  Bela published a great post on how to use a publish and subscribe pattern with JGroups. 

And if you enjoy JSF, check out Stan's contributions to JSFUnit (Thanks Stan).

And JBoss' Hibernate 4 keeps on coming (Thanks Steve).

One reason I enjoy working on these blog posts is because it gives me a couple of hours to reflect on all the significant contributions that JBoss team members make consistently, whether those be code, in-person events (e.g. JUDCons, JUGs, JBugs) or virtual live & on-demand education (webinars, vimeo.com/jbossdeveloper).  It is easy to get caught up, heads down, pounding on the next deliverable.  Stopping for a moment to watch the magic happen is good for the soul.  Go Team!

We've been very busy over the past week, what with more Cloud/OpenShift activities, getting ready for JavaOne and JUDCon London, it's hard to know where to start. So let's dive in chronologically

• So we finally officially announced JUDCon London 2011, which is happening alongside JAX London. The Call for Presentations is short this time, due to some logistical issues, so you should hurry to get your submissions in and get registered!
• The BoxGrinder team made another release, this time version 0.9.5 (if they follow the TorqueBox naming scheme then version 1.0 may happen sometime in 2014!) The biggest change is 0.9.5 is Fedora 16 build support!
• Of course one of the bigger stories last week was when Heroku joined the Java PaaS Club. However, as Rich Sharples pointed out so eloquently, they weren't exactly very enthusiastic about it. Rich wondered why then did they bother? Of course he knew the answer and pointed it out: "Only Java gives developers such a broad range of tools, technologies and APIs – both commercial and open source. Only Java gives you Open Standard enterprisey features like Transactions, Object Persistence, Messaging, Security, Integration, scalability and high availability for when you need them." Along with a couple of nice diagrams to illustrate:

• Mark Little also posted a couple of articles about the Heroku announced, starting first with why an application server actually makes a much better Platform as a Service. As with Rich, the initial article also pulls apart some of the Heroku announcement. "Furthermore, this recent announcement is a great example of how not to build an enterprise PaaS. It's interesting to see that the example used in the announcement is HelloWorld. Somebody more cynical than I might think that it says something about the complexity and enterprise nature of the applications they can support being deployed! Now of course you can argue that you can pull together more feature rich stacks and frameworks on such thin PaaS implementations. Yes, rolling your own stack is a much better use of a developers time compared to getting one out of the box!"
• Mark's subsequent article (Why to need an enterprise platform for a PaaS) goes into much more detail on the various aspects of something like AS7 that really make it a more solid foundation for any PaaS, no matter what the language. "EE6 is a good standard that brings these and more together into a well defined stack. And AS7 is the best implementation of that standard that puts to death the old myths and FUD that Java EE is bloated and unusable ."
• Mr Security, Anil Saldhana, gave us a couple of posts about security in AS7 (SAML based) and a general posting about "man in the middle attacks", prompted by a recent issue around Google SSL certificates. Definitely worth a read, even if you're not using JBoss!
• Alessio Soldano, JBossWS project lead, had some good news for us too this week: "I've recently been offered to join the Apache CXF PMC and I accepted." Congratulations Alessio!
• Big news too was the first developer release of the 1.1 version of IronJacamar! Jesper had this to say: "On the usability front we really want to drive the way that resource adapters should be tested, so improved integration with the Arquillian and ShrinkWrap projects will have a high priority. You will see up-coming releases where having a requirement for on-disk deployment descriptors will be eliminated by using the ShrinkWrap Descriptors project and our own extensions for IronJacamar specific deployment metadata. Another area is better tooling for JCA based projects. We already have the code generator and the validator tools, but better integration with JBossTools will be important. There will also be new tools that will help people migrate from earlier releases of the JBoss Application Server. The 1.1 series will still target the Java EE Connector Architecture 1.6 specification, but we will take a look at adding support for some of the more exotic features of the specification which are optional in the sense of TCK testing."
• Brian Leathem started a new series of articles this week on the Richfaces 4 Component Development Kit (CDK). The first entry is more about setting the scene for what will follow, but you might still find it interesting and definitely worth bookmarking for future entries. As Brian says: "Before I get into specific examples, I’d first like to motivate the series by describing what exactly the CDK is and the problems that it solves.  If you already know all about JSF components, and you want to get straight into using the CDK, skip this blog post! - the rest of the entries in this series will deal purely with implementation details."
• And finally, the Hibernate team have been busy yet again! There's a new CR for Hibernate Core 4.0.0, and Emmanuel announced the 2nd Alpha release of Hibernate Search 4.0.0. Apart from bug fixes, it includes some nice new features such as near realtime searches ("Taking advantage of Lucene's new Near Realtime advancements, Hibernate Search can now search the uncommitted buffers which are still in memory, avoiding costly commits and let the IndexWriter flush periodically as it needs for optimal memory management. Note that Hibernate Search still makes sure that a Query will only see fully committed transactions (no dirty reads).") and being able to add @IndexEmbedded on collections of basic types. Lots more in there, so check it out!

OK, that's it for this week. Don't forget that you can keep up to date with everything that's going on by watching the aggregated JBoss feed!