While JBoss has always been and will ever be a household name in the world Java EE, it has never shied away from challenging and expanding its own zone of comfort, developing solutions for areas that fall outside the scope of traditional Java EE. It all makes sense, because these solutions share the same DNA: the collection of premier-class Java middleware components that make up the JBoss ecosystem. And we have a number of news this week which come to reinforce the idea that, while fostering the growth of enterprise Java in its traditional, Java EE, sense, JBoss is becoming more and more a trusted solution provider outside that space, by addressing other programming models and even languages, all done on top of the rock-solid foundation which is its Java and JVM-oriented middleware.

Ruby Red: JBoss welcomes JRuby

Probably the best illustration of where all this is heading is this week's main headline: the arrival of the JRuby core team - Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo at Red Hat. Initially announced at JRubyConf, this considerably expands the scope of the work already done by the TorqueBox team, as Ruby support on the JVM becomes a first-class project at JBoss. Not only the TorqueBox team will benefit from this, but so will Immutant and OpenJDK - and many other projects inside JBoss. In summary, the polyglot vision of JBoss is now closer to reality as laid out in Mark Little's welcome blog post.

Arquillians establish a beach head on the Spring planet ...

... but the first thing to know about arquillians is that they always come in peace. This is a two-fold success story. For one thing, JBoss Community's debut into GoogleSummer of Code as an independent organization has been auspicious: one of its projects has produced a release within 24 hours of the official coding start. The other side of the story is that, thanks to Jakub Narloch's excellent work, Arquillian has ventured outside it's traditional Java EE space. and with the first alpha release of the Arquilian Spring Extension, started providing support for in-container testing of Spring applications. This adds a capability that complements well the existing unit test support in Spring, and brings a new confidence in the behaviour of the application in its intended environment.

Making it big with Big Data (feat. Infinispan)

In the past week there have been a couple of excellent blog posts which addressed the practical aspects of usingInfinispan in various scenarios. Why are they sogood? Because they're use case driven - they solve actual problems. So if you're working on developing a solution that involves a data grid or a distributed cache, make sure that you check them first:

• Francesco Marchioni has published on his JBoss-focused site mastertheboss.com a tutorial on developing a clustered application with JBoss Data Grid;
• Martin Gencur has published a detailed walkthrough on setting up transactions and relational database backing for Infinispan, for both JBoss and Tomcat;
  
  

Secure your portals with GateIn and PicketLink

So, Diablo III has been released last week, but we're not going to talk about town portals. GateIn is the JBoss project that focuses on portal application development, an environment in which Single Sign On support is a critical feature. So Marek Posolda provides an excellent overview of GateIn's newly added SAML2 integration.

Ceylon's progress

Gavin King has blogged about the status of the upcoming M3 release - the upcoming new features (including JavaScript support), the state the IDE, OpenShift integration.

Advanced Tooling for SOA

Tooling, especially in what concerns visualization and visual design, is a critical part of developing service-oriented architectures. Keith Babo describes the new features of the upcoming SwitchYard Eclipse tooling accompanied by a cool video!

Gary Brown describes in detail the new features of Savara 2.1 Eclipse tooling, especially in what concerns BPMN2 and Switchyard support.

Have released this week

• Aerogear has released version 1.0.0.M4. You can read the entire list of new features, but in the spirit of today's main theme we'd like to highlight the Ruby/TorqueBox demo;
• Seam 2.3.0.Beta2 is out as well, continuing its race towards a final release.
• JBPM 5.3 has been released as well.
• JBoss Tools and Developer Studio Beta 3 are out, with a whole slew of new features and improvements in the area of OpenShift, Maven, BrowerSim, GWT, Annotation Processing and also installable sources - very useful for debugging.

Sightings

• Sanne Grinovero will deliver a talk at Berlin Buzzwords (4-5 June) on using Lucene Index with Infinispan, and Mircea Markus will deliver one too, focused on datagrid performance.
• Kris Verlaenen provides an overview of upcoming JBPM talks and webinars;
• A roundup of upcoming Ceylon events

If you work with the JBoss Community on a regular basis then you will already be aware of the fantastic contributions that come in from all areas with each of the projects having a vibrant community that, through quality submissions, helps to develop and define the direction of those projects; but every now and again something completely unexpected comes along.  Community member Christos Vasilakis has done just that.  While working in his spare time, Christos decided to develop an impressive iPhone app to help with the remote administration of JBoss AS 7 servers and has now released version 1.0 of this app.  You can find more details about it, including how to get hold of the source code, in his announcement.  If you are interested in how this app works alongside JBoss Tools then Max has already answered this, having created a screencast which demonstrates both in action.

JBoss AS 7.1 now on OpenShift

Pete has written an article introducing the availability of JBoss AS 7.1 on OpenShift, the RedHat Platform-as-a-Service (Paas) provider.  As part of this announcement the team have put together a series of videos demonstrating how quickly you can deploy a mobile ready application to the cloud, deploy and consume REST services, take advantage of high performance messaging and much more.  Additional videos are planned for the series so pleae keep checking the Vimeo channel for updates.

Migrating to Java EE6

Shane continues his fantastic series with another three posts discussing the issues encountered when upgrading the JBoss Trading application from a Java EE5 based application to a Java EE6 based application.  In these final three parts he covers

- Part III - the final configuration modifications required to support the structure introduced in Part II

- Part IV - the source code and configuration changes required for deployment of the EJB/REST/WS clients and integration tests

- Part V - the final part covering the cleanup of source code and configuration for deployment, integration and performance testing

In another post about migration, Ray Ploski introduces part 3 of a series on how to migrate from Spring to Java EE 6.  The series, written by Bert Ertman and Paul Bakker of Luminis, goes into great depth on the rationale behind the migration and demonstrates, through real world examples, not only how to upgrade the application but also how it can be tested using Arquillian.

RichFaces and Twitter Bootstrap

The RichFaces team have recently begun an effort to integreate the RichFaces CDK with Twitter Bootstrap, thanks in no small part to community member Paul Dijou.  Brian has written an article introducing the work and discussing some of his favourite components.  You will also be able to find details on hoe to run the current demo and, if you would like to join the fun, on how to get involved with the future development.

Drools Planner benchmarking goes multi-threaded

Lukáš Petrovický has recently submitted modifications to Drools Planner in order to enable support for multi-threading during benchmarking.  Geoffrey has written an article introducing the new functionality, describing how it can be enabled and demonstrates some of its obvious benefits.

A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence

As part of the preparations for the Drools 5.4 release, Mark Proctor has recently updated the introductory documentation to include a fascinating, brief history of Artificial Intelligence.  Well worth a read if you are even remotely interested in this interesting topic.

Releases for the week

The TorqueBox team have quickly followed up on their last release by releasing TorqueBox 2.0.3.

The Hibernate team have two releases this week

• Hibernate Validator 4.3.0.Final
• Hibernate Search 4.1.1.Final

The Weld team have released Weld 1.1.8.Final.

The latest version of the JBoss AS7 Management Console, version 1.3.0 is now available.

The Errai team have just released the first release in their latest and greatest series, Errai 2.0 is now available for download.

The Portal team have released the third beta of their next major release, Portlet Bridge 3.0.0.Beta3.

The RHQ team have also annouced the release of RHQ 4.4 released.

That's all for this week, make sure that you check back next week to catch up on all that is happening within the JBoss Community.