If you have been a regular reader of this Editorial then you will know that this has been another great year for the JBoss Community and, with so many active projects under the JBoss Community umbrella, there has never been a better time for those who wish to jump in and contribute.  Contributing is easy, just choose a project you are interested in (there must be one!), look at the outstanding tasks, talk with the team to see how you can help and next year you will see the fruits of your labour in the Editorial (and many other places!).

AeroGear from a Different "Angle"

The AeroGear team have been having a number of 'watercooler' discussions about Angular.js, a JavaScript application framework from Google.  As a result of these discussions Kris Borcher decided that he would spend time creating an application using both AeroGear.js and Angular.js, an experiment which has been very successful.  Kris chose to develop a mobile information site for the upcoming DevNexus conference and has now posted his thoughts on the experiment.

ModeShape and Concurrent Writes

The ModeShape team have written a great article explaining how concurrent access to your data will work within your application and what you can do to reduce any remaining contention within your data access patterns.  This is a must-read for anyone using ModeShape.

Invoking EJBs from a Remote AS7 Instance

Have you ever wondered what needs to be done to invoke EJBs from another JBoss AS7 instance?  Francesco Marchioni, of mastertheboss.com, has written a very nice tutorial demonstrating the necessary steps and showing just how easy it can be done.

AS7 Console - Future Direction

The AS7 team recently held a developer meeting to discuss the future direction of the app server, during which Heiko Braun gave an interesting talk on the ideas being considered for AS7 Console 2.0.  Heiko has now made his slidedeck available, some of the highlight of which are a focus on extensibility, task repository and a model based user interface.

Bean Validation in the press

The German journal Javamagazin has recently published an article on the work which has gone into the Bean Validation 1.1 specification.  If you are interested in this article, and can speak German, then check out Gunnar's article where you can find a PDF version of the article generously provided by the authors.

Drools 6.0 - Annotation Driven Development

The Drools team are getting ready to release the first Alpha of Drools & jBPM 6.0.  If you are a user of Drools then you may already realise that there are some major changing coming in 6.0, such as the move toward a convention based style of project and  support for annotation driven development.  If you are interested in seeing what the annotation style of development looks like then check out Mark Proctor's taster.

Score flexibility in Planner

Geoffrey De Smet has created a screencast showing how easy the scoring function can be changed when trying to optimise resource usage in Drools Planner, demonstrated with an example on routing vehicles.

jBPM Console NG

Mauricio has written a fantastic article describing the updates which have been happening within the next generation of the jBPM Console.  The article discusses a demonstration that he gave recently at JBUG London and provides more information on some of the topics which were covered.  Mauricio has also included a screencast of the demo and a video of his presentation to JBUG London, the slides for which are also available.

News from Recent Events

Jeff Yu recently gave a presentation at JUDCon China entitled "Building your own service in SwitchYard".  In this presentation Jeff introduced SwitchYard, showing how easy services can be created before moving on to a more esoteric topic, how to integrate your own component into the SwitchYard runtime using the Riftsaw project as his example. 

Eric Schabell recently had the privilege of giving the first talk at the newly formed JBugNL, discussing OpenShift and development in the cloud.  Eric has now posted the slidedeck for those who attended, or missed, this well received talk.

JBoss in Book Form

This week sees the release of the book "jBPM5 Developer Guide", written by Mauricio and Esteban.  If you are interested in getting hold of a copy of this book, in either printed or electronic formats, then please check Kris' article where he includes details of some discount codes that have been generously provided by Packt Publishing.

Packt Publishing have also teamed up with Piergiorgio Lucidi, one of the authors of the book "GateIn Cookbook", to give away copies of the book to four lucky winners.  The competition closes soon, on the 25th December, so be quick if you want to win a copy.

New Releases for the Week

This week sees a number of exciting releases from the JBoss Communities

• The Teiid project have released Teiid Designer 8.0 Final
• The app server team have released JBoss AS7 Console 1.5.0
• The Errai project have released Errai 2.2.0.CR2
• The RichFaces team have released RichFaces 4.3.0.M3
• The Weld team have released Weld 2.0.0.Beta2, incorporating the latest CDI 1.1 spec changes
• The Infinispan team have released Infinispan 5.2.0.Beta6

That's all for this week, tune in next week for the last Editorial of 2012.