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2012

It's summertime (at least in the northern hemisphere), and while a lot of us are planning our vacations, inspiration does not have a calendar or schedule. So the JBoss team continues to balance work and break time, continuing to deliver great software (in fact we have seen a bountiful harvest of releases since last week) and rally around great ideas for our future roadmap. Here's what happened:

 

An Arquillian wave

 

The Arquilllians have launched another full-scale assault on bug lands, with a slew of releases covering the core and extensions.

 

  • First, Karel Piwko has announced the release of Arquillian Drone Extension 1.1.0.CR2 - mostly a bug fix release.
  • Bartosz Majsak followed close with Arquillian TestRunner Spock 1.0.0.Alpha2 - a component upgrade and bug fix release as well. If you haven't had a chance to try Spock, it's a good moment to give this  Java/Groovy test and specification framework a try now - 
  • Jakub Narloch continues his highly successful Google Summer of Code project with the release of the Arquillian Spring Extension 1.0.0.Alpha2. This is in fact a major overhaul of the previous release providing:
    • the Spring integration functionality has been reorganized so it does not target specific versions, but capabilities (xml, JavaConfig, environment). While capabilities can be traced to the releases in which they have been introduced, this provides a more intuitive way of deciding what needs to be included in the tests;
    • an embedded Spring container has been added, allowing faster testing of features that do not require container capabilities;
    • the Spring extension has been integrated with Arquillian Warp allowing the testing of Spring MVC artifacts like controllers while using Warp and Drone to specify client actions;
  • And last but not least, Aslak Knutsen has announced the release of Arquillian Core 1.0.2.Final, containing bug fixes and minor but important enhancements such as environment variable support.

 

Check all of them out - those bugs won't stand a chance.

 

Well-designed business processes with JBPM and Drools

 

A few updates for jBPM, covering enhancements to the visual design support and services:

 

The jBPM team has announced the release of jBPM designer 2.3.0.Final (read Tihomir Surdilovic's post for more details). And if you thought that business stuff can't be cool too, check voice-driven BPM.

Mauricio Salatino (aka Salaboy) provides some insights into the jBPM form builder.

 

Also, Microsoft Academic Search has been added to the jBPM community service thanks to the community contributor Omar Saif.

 

The biggest strengths of the tight jBPM/Drools integration in jBPM5 are highlighted by another post by Mauricio, who shows us a very useful set of patterns combining processes and rules.

 

Finally, Geoffrey de Smet demonstrates, with hard data, the benefits of the new Selector architecture in Drools Planner 5.5.0.Beta1, concerning memory consumption and general performance.

 

More secure with JBoss AS7 and JBoss EAP6

 

Although the Arquillian team will keep us safe from the bugs, there are many other threats that your application is facing. Luckily, you have many options for securing your JBoss applications. Shane Johnson shows us a pretty advanced option: enabling the special Intel AES-NI instructions that accelerate AES encryption and decryption on JBoss EAP6 running on RHEL6. Why is it important? For one thing, faster cryptographic operations means that you can use stronger options without paying a performance penalty - and read the rest of the article to learn what and how.

 

On the development side, Marek Posolda shows us how to integrate 3rd party identity and service providers with Picketlink: the example covers Google Apps and Salesforce. In the current environment where Platform-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service integration is often a requirement, this is a compelling showcase of Picketlink's capabilities, but also an informative practical guideline.

 

And it's worth mentioning here that Anil Saldhana, JBoss' lead security architect has been selected by OASIS as an OASIS Distinguished Contributor as a recognition of the commitment to contributing to the advancement of open source security standards,

 

Infinispan 5.2.0.Alpha2, now with more Map/Reduce

 

The Infinispan team has announced the release of Infinispan 5.2.0.Alpha, and Vladimir Blagojevic describes quite in detail the Map/Reduce enhancements that have been included in this release.

 


Change of helm for TorqueBox

 

With Bob McWhirther's move as Director of Polyglot for JBoss, the leadership of TorqueBox has passed on to Ben Browning. Congratulations, both Bob and Ben - and keep those releases coming. Oh, one just did:TorqueBox 2.1.0.Final is out.

 

Output buffering for servlet requests

 

JBoss' own Lincoln Baxter continues enhancing his Rewrite project - a trove of useful components for request-driven processing in web applications - regardless of the view technology being used (JSF, Spring MVC), etc.  The last addition as of release 1.1.0.Final is output buffering, which complements the response-enhancing facilities already in place.

 

Community JBoss Mastery

 

The excellent site mastertheboss.com continues it's great series of tutorials with an example of using TimeMachine scheduler on JBoss AS7 by Zemian Deng. A great example of the JBoss AS7 architecture allows seamless integration with other community projects.

 

In addition to that, Francesco Marchioni shares his thoughts comparing JBoss and Oracle middleware, based on earlier blog post by Oracle comparing the two. A good read, especially since it reflects the views of an independent community member.

 

Forge gets a new site

 

Also, the Forge project has a new, Awestruct-powered site. Check it out here.

 

Other releases

 

 

Sightings

 

  • JBUG Beijing has met on July 26, with a rich agenda, featuring Java EE and the Cloud, Hibernate OGM and HornetQ.

 

Thanks for reading our newsletter and see you next week for another roundup.

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Welcome to another week in the world of JBoss.org!

 

This week I wanted to focus a bit more on the Summer as we all are on, heading out to or just back from our Summer vacations. The hectic weeks leading up to and participating in JBoss World in Boston are behind us, the latest releases are out the door and you have pushed your last blog article before turning on that out-of-office reply in your e-mail. It is a grand feeling indeed. A break well deserved if you ask me. So before you run off into the sun, drink too much and code too little for the next few weeks, let's take a look at what has been going on around JBoss this week.

 

Events

July 16th there was a jBPM webinar, "jBPM5: build intelligent business processes", by Kris Verlaenen. Recordings are available for download.

 

On Aug 21 there will be a JBoss BRMS webinar, "Build highly scaleable rule-driven applications with JBoss BRMS". Watch for the link to register when it appears and sign up.

 

Blogs / Articles

Very cool blog in Chinese, so bring your translator, by Strong Liu on Hibernate OGM.

 

Adam Warski covers Generating Caching and Envers.

 

John Mazz talks about the need for a local mechanism to manage JBoss AS7 directly through the management API.

 

Project Overlord has become a full fledged project in the JBoss family, see what Gary Brown has to say about it. He also presents the BAM comonents in wonderful detail.

 

David Bosschaert presents the decision made to postpone JIGSAW in Java SE 8.

 

Marek Posolda presents two very good videos that showcase GateIn and SAML2 integration for SSO, Google Apps and Salesforce.

 

Aerogear is still hiring! Jay Balunas talks about this, JBoss World, their new project site and the Aerogear native client libraries.

 

The jBPM Web Designer project that Tihomir Surdilovic has been rockin' lately is finally part of the Drools and jBPM team github. He also highlights a community application that was blogged by Luis Azevado and a new node that has been added based on MAS by Saiful Omar.

 

A series of blogs by me on what can be achieved with projects jBPM and Drools after they have been productized into JBoss BRMS:

- a nice video for your morning coffee

- extending BRMS with BAM functionality

 

Over at How to JBoss, a nice blog you might want to check out, two demos posted highlighting jBPM 5 functionality. These are repeatable and free to use as you see fit:

- customer evaluation demo (rule integration)

- rewards demo (human tast integration)

 

Releases

A list of new project releases, enjoy!

 

 

Thinking of getting involved in a JBoss User Group (JBUG)?

Setting up or running a JBoss User Group? Follow @JBossNews on twitter and catch the next event online especially for you and your group.

 

Before closing it all out this week, how about sharing an image of your favorite vacation coding spot? It might be in your back yard, next to a pool or on the top of a mountain. Show us, just comment this article and upload your pictures!

codinggarden.jpeg

Here is where I do my summer vacation coding, beneath the grape vines on a picnic table!

For many of us within the JBoss Community, Red Hat Summit and JBoss World was the culmination of much work over the preceding months; with numerous project and platform releases, presentations and demonstrations all being finalised in time for the conference.  The weeks that followed have seen lots of us taking a well deserved break in order to recharge our batteries but, unfortunately, this also means that this week's editorial is a little light on content.  But never fear, what we do have is definitely worth exploring .....

 

JBoss World Keynote

 

One of the highlights of this year's JBoss World was the keynote demonstration, used to showcase many of the technologies that are now present in the projects and platforms.  The backend services utilised BRMS and jBPM, in order to provide Business Analysts with an easy way of defining and modifying the business logic that was used to drive our simple Toy Store, and exposed a set of REST APIs which could then be consumed by client applications.

 

As part of the demonstration Kris Borcher developed HTML5 client applications to provide buyer, approver and Vice Principal functionality to a mobile workforce.  These clients could be run through a browser, directly from an OpenShift server, or deployed as a native application on mobile devices thanks to the power of Apache Cordova.  If you want to find out more about the client applications and how they were developed then head over to Kris' post for more details.

 

Infinispan at JBoss World and JUDCon

 

The Infinispan project had a great presence at JBoss World and JUDCon with Galder, Manik and Alan Santos all playing their part.  Galder was on stage with Heiko to give a presentation entitled "Effectively Manage & Monitor Red Hat JBoss Data Grid Nodes".  Galder has more information about this presentation, along with his favourite highlights of the conference, in his post "JBoss Data Grid lands in Red Hat Summit".  Vladimir was also at the conferences although he was drawn more to the presentations on Infinispan's Map/Reduce and distributed executor capabilities.

 

Continuous Enterprise Development in Java

 

Andrew Lee Rubinger, Dan Allen and Aslak Knutsen have begun work on their next book, "Continuous Enterprise Development in Java", which will be published by O'Reilly Media.  The book will guide the user through some of the most common and interesting use-cases in building multiuser applications and will be based on the work being done through the JBoss Developer Framework.  They are currently on course to begin the Early Access Program around the time of Java One 2012 with the formal release in the Spring of 2013.

 

Custom Analyzers for Fields in Class or Field Bridges

 

Prompted by a number of enquires in the Hibernate Search forums and on Stack Overflow, Hardy has written a good article explaining the options available for defining custom analyzers for fields which are introduced through Class or Field Bridges.  All his solutions use only functionality which is available in the latest Hibernate Search release.

 

IntelliFest

 

Members of the Drools team will be attending IntelliFest in October, providing the normal Drools & jBPM bootcamp in the run up to the main conference.  Registration for the bootcamp is free but places are limited.

 

New Releases

 

The Ceylon team have announced the M3.1 release of Ceylon and the Ceylon IDE.  This release addresses several bugs and introduces a number of significant improvements in the language module and IDE.

 

The Hibernate team have made successive releases of Hibernate ORM, first announcing Hibernate ORM 4.1.5 followed quickly after by Hibernate ORM 4.1.5.SP1 to address an issue which slipped through the net.

 

Bela has announced the release of JGroups 3.0.11 and 3.1.0.

 

The ModeShape team have announced the release of ModeShape 2.8.2.Final, addressing some issues which were discovered after the previous version had been released.

 

That's all we have at the end of a quiet week.  Drop back next week for more updates from the JBoss Community.

June 2012 has been a historic month for JBoss, we delivered practically every product we produce (e.g. Enterprise Application Platform 6, JBoss Data Grid 6, Web Framework Kit 2, JBoss Developer Studio 5, BRMS 5.3, with SOA Platform arriving in July), we gave birth to The JBoss Way, put on a massive virtual event, wrapped up the month with JBoss World at Red Hat Summit and had time to expand our influence in the open source ecosystem.  So, the first week of July is a wee bit of time to catch our collective breath - and produce some very interesting blogs! 

 

JBoss World 2012

The keynote at JBoss World captures where we have been and where we are going.  Our video team has been able to turnaround the recording with lightning speed.  This year, much like 2011, we were able to pull off a live demonstration, requiring audience participation via their smartphone while running all of our software in the cloud at OpenShift. Now we have published a high-level overview of the demonstration and open sourced the codebase, for more information check out www.jboss.org/jbw2012keynote

 

Kris Verlaenen has also produced a blog providing additional details as the role played by jBPM and JBoss BRMS.   Please download the code and give it a try - we would love to hear your feedback and hear about your adventures with running this demo at your local user's group meeting!  If you have questions related to the demo, pop into the JBoss Developer Framework forums and ask!

 

If you like to watch other recordings of JBoss World and Red Hat Summit 2012 sessions, please check out our YouTube playlist at www.youtube.com/redhat

 

JBoss World was also an amazing opportunity to put our developer focused efforts in the hands of real users - we conducted hands-on labs where dozens of individuals were able to build their first applications The JBoss Way.  This was particularly exciting for me personally since I was deeply involved with the design of the IDE (JBoss Developer Studio), requirements for Maven and I wrote the Introduction and Getting Started tutorial that we used in the classroom.  For many of the students it was their first opportunity to get hands-on with Java EE6, jQuery Mobile and Maven.  

 

Google IO 2012

We were also involved in Google IO - how did we manage that when Google IO was happening at the Moscone Center in San Francisco at the same time all of the JBoss'ers were at the Hynes Center in Boston?  It takes planning!  :-)  Google announced a new open source initiative for GWT that we are excited to be involved with - Red Hat has numerous products that leverage GWT for our web-based UIs such as the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 and AS7 Admin Console, JBoss Operations Network (RHQ), Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and JBoss BRMS (Drools Guvnor).   In addition, we have been working to extend GWT via our Errai project with Java EE 6 capabilities - making the programming model vastly easier to work with.  Errai is also featured in our keynote demo, managing the real-time updates to the browser-based leaderboard.

 

Interesting Blogs & News

* Emmanuel Bernard answers the question "do we need a JPA for NoSQL JSR?"  - join in the conversation by adding your comment!

* Kris Verlaenen, jBPM Project Lead, discusses jBPM5 support in BRMS 5.3

* The JBoss Community Asylum podcast cranked out a session on Ceylon

* Ramesh wrote up his experiences at JBoss World - focusing on the various data related technologies such as Infinispan (JBoss Data Grid), GlusterFS and his own presentation related to Teiid

* Geoffrey De Smet was interviewed by FLOSS for Drools Planner and he published the link to the recording this past weekend

* John Sanda published a cool video demonstrating how you can install and configure Cassandra via RHQ

* Bert Erman and Paul Bakker of Luminis - active members of the overall JBoss community delivered Part 4 of their series of articles on Migrating Spring applications to Java EE 6

* Mark Proctor blogs about Drools 5.5, 6.0 and The Future, the Drools family of technologies continue to innovate and maintain its game-changing influence in the world of business rules, processes and events

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