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