Welcome back. We're still here, still busy as ever. But we're glad you came to read our weekly roundup of news. We're as excited as you are, becausewe get to count our treasures, a weekful of new events and achievements. So let us take a break and walk with you.

Arquillian, finally

To me (and not just me), Arquillian is one of the most interesting projects in the JBoss portfolio. Not only due to its technical merits, which abound, but also because it makes it easy to argue that JBoss 'gets it right' when it comes to high quality open source software. It's a real solution to a real challenge: integration testing for Java applications. A new idea for solving an old problem. That has moved from a proof of concept to an entire ecosystem incredibly fast. Because it's community-driven. And easy to learn. So it's cool.

It's first stable release 1.0.0.Final has just come out and it's truly a reason to celebrate. Currently, Arquillian supports running your true tests (that is, exercising your actual application code) in most major application servers or servlet containers (think JBoss, Glassfish, Tomcat, Weblogic, Websphere and so on), and embedded containers as well (although you may want to be careful with that - read Dan's post for details).

And as Arquillian goes, so go it's siblings: a number of other extensions have had their releases this week as well. Because not only business code matters - testing the UI, browser automation  are equally important. So now you can do your applications the right way and keep them bug-free - a complete ecosystem is available for testing them from end to end - from the application server to the browser and tothe mobile platform. Here's a quick roundup of the projects from the Arquillian family that have had their final releases in the past week:

• Arquillian Core, learn more from Aslak Knudsen and Dan Allen
• Arquillian Drone,http://arquillian.org/blog/2012/04/10/arquillian-extension-drone-1-0-0-Final/an extension which provides a simpler way of driving functional tests (i.e. in browser or client-side), learn more from Karel Piwko
• Arquillian Graphene - a Selenium extension with a type-safe, simplified API, learn more from Lukas Fryc

Arquillian Persistence Extensions has released 1.0.0.Alpha4 too. A complete list of modules and most up-to-date information about their state can be found here.

A grid that can hold all your data

The other big news of the week is the first beta release of the JBoss Data Grid, which is the JBoss product built around Infinispan - our high performance data rid community project. For mission critical projects, this means an opportunity of breaking free from the shackles of relational databases and having a fully supported, high performance data store at their fingertips. The significance of this event sis best explained by Rich Sharples and Manik Surtani.

At the movies. Starring: JBoss Developer Studio

How do you get started with JBoss Developer Studio? Follow Max Andersen's blog, and learn more about it, as well as the future plans for m2e-wtp, a critical component of the Maven integration in Eclipse. Burr Sutter has created a series of screencasts, which introduce the major features of the IDE.

Ceylon Herd

Stephane Epardaud provides a detailed description of the newly added module system and repository of Ceylon: Ceylon Herd. You will learn the rationale behind the decision to create it from scratch, as well as its main design goals.

Web services

Writing applications that rely on web-services is often getting to the challenge where, in order to see that your code is working correctly it needs some reference endpoints which can be invoked to test interoperability. Alessio Soldano's blog provides a demo on a number of such webservice endpoints deployed in OpenShift, which demonstrate the capabilities of JBoss AS 7.1, especially in the WS-Security area. So, anyone can get access the demo and try them out. And see that everything just works.

Transactionality in massively parallel systems

Mark Little's has published a higher level perspective on transactions and their role in the modern, highly concurrent architectures. As with many other aspects of designing and implementing software systems, the commoditization of multi-core systems has changed the way in which we need to look at transactions - the single-threaded, database-driven perspective is not enough anymore. 

Releases

Outside Arquillan and its extensions, a few other JBoss projects have released new versions in the past week:

• Weld 1.1.7
  
• Teiid Designer 7.7 and Teiid 8.0.CR1
• JBoss ESB 4.11
• Drools 5.4.0.CR1
• JBPM Designer 2.1
• Infinispan 5.1.4.CR1

Sightings

• If you are in Billund, Denmark next week, check the JBoss sessions at MOW 2012 (18th-20th April)
• The DC JBUG has a meetup on April 18, with CloudBees as a guest, showcasing deploying Java EE Web profile applications to various containers including Jboss AS 7
• Sanne Grinovero and Mircea Markus will talk at the Portugal JUG on April 18 about Infinispan and Hibernate OGM

Thanks for joining us again and come back next week for another roundup!