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2012

Weekly Editorial

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

 

This week we again catch you up with lots of news in the wonderful world of JBoss. Summer is winding down, students are heading back to university, the weather is starting to cool a bit around my area of the world. In short, time to shake of the lazy vacation temperament and get back on the horse. Get back into the coding game. With this fresh bit of energy we bring you the following news.

 

Events

 

From 1-3 October you can hear both Mark Little and myself talking at GOTO Aarhus (I am talking best practices in BRMS).

 

The biggest news this week would have to be the acquisition of Polymita, a BPM start-up in Spain. Both Mark Little and Kris Verleanen posted articles on this subject.

 

Blogs / Articles

 

Pretty neat article over on javalobby on DZone about a company called EPAMEDIA using Drools Planner for the dynamic placement of subjects on its media sites.

 

Last week there was a webinar on best practices for large scale enterprise rules and process deployments, you can catch the recording here. It covers both Drools and jBPM in the JBoss BRMS product.

 

Gunner Morling is asking for some feedback on bean validation for method validation and inheritance, help him out! David Bosschaert is also looking for feedback on a slew of OSGI RFP's, please take a look and comment.

 

Andre Diethisheim put together a very nice example for explaining how to make use of the JBoss library behind OpenShift cli access.

 

Marek Goldmann talks about how to generate a database schema with OpenJPA and Hibernate in this blog.

 

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, I want to welcome back all of the coders that have been on vacation, students that are moving back into their dorms to get ready for the new school year and the rest of you out there that have just decided to get back to work. Slacking and relaxing time is over! Time to get back to fishing for that perfect project to work on and polish up some code for a fresh commit. Like we say where I come from:

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A lot happened in the Summer of 2012, so much I thought it was worthy of a high-level recap.   

 

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As always, the global JBoss community continues to create new code, capabilities and content.  What follows are some of the highlights that I have discovered over the last week.

 

Recent Blogs:

 

Releases

While many of us are still relaxing during the Northern Summer months, taking time out to enjoy the sun (hopefully you have had some sun) and catching up with some reading, there are still many JBoss projects and communities working hard to bring new features to us all.  This week's Editorial has something for everyone, whatever your interest.

 

Infinispan book hits the shelves

 

Manik and Francesco Marchioni have been working on an Infinispan book over the last few months, entitled "Infinispan Data Grid Platform".  The book provides an introduction to the concepts behind distributed caching and data grids, a hands-on guide to configuring and using Infinispan and much more.

 

The book can now be bought through Packt Publishing and is available in printed and ebook formats.

 

ZeroTurnaround interviews Lincoln Baxter II

 

Lincoln has recently been interviewed by Oliver White from ZeroTurnaround.  In the interview Lincoln talks briefly about SocialPM, development of Errai UI, how JRebel helps productivity during the development phase amongst other things.  Checkout the interview on their site and keep an eye open for the next one which will feature Dan Allen.

 

Simulation testing in Guvnor

 

Geoffrey has created a screencast to demonstrate the new simulation feature in Guvnor, allowing the testing of Drools Rules and Complex Event Processing over specific time periods.  The screencast demonstrates how to define complex test scenarios using the new UI.  Checkout the screencast and provide feedback to the team on their blog.

 

Using AS 7 management API programmatically

 

Not satisfied with spending time writing a book on Infinispan, Francesco has also been busy writing an article which demonstrates how the AS 7 Management API can be accessed programmatically.  If you wish to provide management integration with the server, perhaps even create your own tooling to support your efforts, then head over to mastertheboss and check it out.

 

BPM tips and tricks with Eric

 

If you are interested in getting the best out of BPM and the JBoss BRMS platform then Eric has added some great articles for you to check out.

 

In the first article, "Adding on JasperReports to JBoss Enterprise BRMS 5.3", Eric highlights a guide which was written by Kumar Bijyendra to demonstrate how easy it is to integrate JasperReports with the BRMS platform.  The guide covers all the necessary steps, including how to build JasperReports and install it into the platform.  Check this out and send feedback/thanks to Eric and Bij.

 

In the second article, "tips for your BPM Process Initialization Layer", Eric kicks off a series looking at Best Practices for implementing a business process solution with JBoss BRMS.  Eric starts the discussion with a high level view of the architecture before diving into the first topic, how to handle the Process Initialization Layer.  There are more articles planned for the series, each of which will cover a different layer involved with a successful implementation.

 

What's new with Ceylon

 

If you have not being keeping track on the progress of Ceylon then you may be surprised to hear that it is now possible to compile Ceylon to JavaScript.  Why would you want to do this?  To run Ceylon in the browser of course.

 

The Ceylon team are making good use of this capability by including a web-hosted IDE, in order to easily explore the language, as well as enabling embedded execution of the examples within their language introduction and tour.

 

Stéphane has more information on these features and ends his post with lots of reasons why you should consider contributing to this exciting development.

 

New releases for the week

 

 

That's all for this week, check back next week for more news from the JBoss Community.

It's summertime. People take a well deserved break and recharge their batteries. A good time to step back from your desk for a while. It keeps you motivated. Especially if you work in jobs that require creativity and passion. Like in open source software development. So do we here at JBoss: We take it easy this month.

Process and task form editing in jBPM

If you can't keep your hands from your keyboard, here's something you can watch from a chair within your garden. Tihomir recorded a video that shows how process and task form editing [1] within the jBPM designer works.

If this does wheaten your appetite, Kris did compile a list of jBPM related resources [5] that popped up over last few weeks.

Improvements and bug fixes to the AS7 web interface

Worked hasn't stopped on the console yet. You could as well consider it being a minimum viable product [2]. It's moving slowly, but did get some considerable improvements [3] this month:

  • Revamped domain deployments
  • Expression resolver
  • Configuration browser
An introduction to SAML

Shane maintains a notable blog with a large number of general interest (still software engineering/architecture) topics. In this month column he gives you an introduction [4] to SAML: purpose, process flow, etc.

Wrecking your digital life (or being wrecked)

Another security topic this month. As many of you might already have heard, Matt Honan's (Wired) accounts have been hacked, with severe consequences for him. Anil, one of our security advocates, provides some insights [6] how google accounts can be proceed from being vulnerable against attacks like this. It's worth reading the full story though.

New releases

Before I head back to beach myself, here's a number of notable releases this week:

Last but not least: Refactor your wetware

Here's an alternative way to improve and enhance your skills. It can even be practiced at the beach: read a book.

My recommendation this month: "Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware" [7]

 

So long, and thanks for the fish.

Heiko

 

Resources

  1. http://planet.jboss.org/post/process_and_task_form_editing_in_jbpm_designer
  2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product
  3. http://planet.jboss.org/post/jboss_as7_console_1_4_0_improvements_and_bugfixes
  4. http://planet.jboss.org/post/saml_behind_the_wheel
  5. http://planet.jboss.org/post/jbpm_what_did_i_miss_last_2_weeks
  6. http://planet.jboss.org/post/gmail_can_be_key_to_your_digital_life
  7. http://pragprog.com/book/ahptl/pragmatic-thinking-and-learning

What looks like a quiet summer is in fact the midpoint between an eventful end of June and the start of a busy September. So we may have fewer news this week, but they're as fresh and as interesting as you are used to.

 

Polyglot and cross-platform: C# client for Infinispan

 

Not only is Infinispan a premier Java caching and datagrid solution, but it's reach goes beyond the JavaEE platform with the Alpha release of it's C# client. Mircea Markus blogs about the release, the result of the work done by Sunimal Rathnayake - yet another successful Google Summer of Code project from JBoss.

 

The Benefits of OSS

 

Mark Proctor muses over the benefits of an open source ecosystem - compared to proprietary technologies. While the discussion is carried out in the specific context of Progress divesting itself of Savion, the general principles still apply: open-source technology backed by a strong community carries far less risk than proprietary lock-in - they aren't dependent of a specific company's business strategy.

 

More rules and processes

 

Mauricio Salatino continues his series of articles on rules/process integration with JBPM and Drools with two new entries here - focusing on older integration paterns and here - focusing on how to put the rule engine in Reactive Mode.

 

Meet JBoss Tools users

 

Max Andersen is sharing some data gathered from the opt-in ping-back feature available in JBoss Tools and JBoss Developer Studio, along with his personal conclusions.

 

Arquillian at JavaOne

 

The Arquillian team has published an overview of all the JavaOne talks where Ike will be present - if you are there and want to learn more about Arquillian in a specific context, there's your guide.

 

Master the Boss

 

Francesco Marchioni from mastertheboss.com has published two new interesting tutorials: one on using Netty, and the other one on JNDI configuration for various versions of JBoss AS.

 

How to JBoss

 

On howtojboss.com (a site that you should be familiar with already) Shane Johnson has published a couple of articles that show how to monitor and manage the performance and scalability of your JBoss EAP installations. The first article shows you how to tweak your user resource limits (ulimits) to fit scenarios that require a  large number of concurrent connections. The second article shows you how to use JMeter for identifying your maximum concurrency throughput. Both articles are very important, because they show you how to tweak the performance of your running applications, which is an important aspect when they reach production.

 

Releases

 

That's pretty much it for this week - enjoy your summer and join us next week for another roundup.

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