Modularity is a hot topic today and, while Java EE modularity isn't something that we focus on this week (except for a bit of news about Enterprise OSGi JPA), our editorial will be modular too : a collection of small stories about the latest developments in the JBoss eco-system. And what's the unifying thread? Focus on innovation and dedicated community work.

 

Can you guess my data structure if I tell you my storage medium?

 

Shane Johnson provides a comparative overview of various storage media, mirrored with data structure types. As it turns out, each of them have their own advantages and disadvantages, depending on your use case, something that you need to remember in order to get your Big Data right. Moreover, certain media types are suited better than others when it comes to storing specific data structures, something that Shane does a great job highlighting.

 

What is Testable Architecture and how can Savara help?

 

Every now and then, it is good to learn about projects, that, while active, do not always get a lot of exposure. So, this week, I had the chance to learn more about Savara, a project that develops a set of tools around the concept of Testable Architecture - a methodology for developing software that posits that any artifacts defined during the development lifecycle should be developed in such a way that they can be validated against other artifacts in preceding and subsequent phases. This is especially useful for design-intensive projects, especially for SOA, EAI and BPM. So, if you're developing a project in one of these areas, try Savara! Gary Brown has published two articles, a very interesting use case that shows Savara at work for implementing the ZDLC and one describing the new features of Savara 2.1.0.Final, especially BPMN2 support and SwitchYard integration.

 

Complex example of SOA and BRMS with JBoss technologies

 

Staying on the topic of SOA and BRMS, Eric Schabell has blogged about the Home Mortgage Demo project that uses JBoss SOA-P and JBoss BRMS to integrate rules, services, ESB, and BPEL orchestration to pre-qualify home loan requests.

 

Additonally, Eric has provided an update on creating Maven artifacts from JBoss BRMS.

 

What is new in Drools?

 

Geoffrey De Smet has provided an overview of the automatic solution cloning feature provided by Drools 6.0.0.Beta1 (to be available in the final release). Mark Proctor has announced the intent of dropping JSR94 and the reasons for it, inviting the community to provide feedback.

 

What is OData and how does Teiid support it?

 

OData is a web protocol for querying and updating data, that provides a standard way for describing CRUD operations (such as RESTful) web services and modeling your data. It prevents application developers from spending unneeded time designing their web services and data model, with the added benefit that adopting the standard improves interoperability out of the box.

In his post, Rajesh Reddy makes a good case for adopting the OData standard, but more than that, describes how Teiid supports it and integrates with it, which is a natural fit, given it's mission statement around data integration.

 

Will you be in Brno at the JHackFest?

 

Developer Conference, held in Brno is an annual conference for Linux and JBoss developers, organized by Red Hat Czech Republic, Fedora and the JBoss community, on February 23rd & 24th, 2013. Part of the conference - and you'll love this - a hackfest! Read Lukas Fryc's post for more details about the event, as well as a very detailed account of Arquillian's team plans.

 

What does Errai 3 bring new?

 

Errai team members have published a couple of new articles, focusing on the new additions in version 3.0 of the framework.

  • Mike Brock describes the new style bindings annotations that allows to address style changes in a cross-cutting, declarative style;
  • Christian Sadilek introduces RPC batching,  a features that allows to execute RPC server calls in a batch from Errai client code, thus greatly increasing the efficiency of the client-server communication.

 

What is new in Ceylon since M4?

 

Gavin King has published an extensive article about the current state of Ceylon M5, the new features that have been implemented so far, the ones that have been considered since M4 but haven't made it, for various reasons, and of course, the ones that remain to be implemented. Additionally, Gavin discusses the notion of expressiveness in programming languages, focusing on the tradeoff of extensibility vs. understandabilty. So, if you take an interest in Ceylon, both will surely be an interesting read.

 

Nested transactions and timeouts

 

John Mazzitelli tries to answer an important question that arises with nested transactions: if a transaction is started within a thread that already has one, will the parent time out without taking the consideration the time while it was suspended, or will the transaction manager count the effective time while the transaction was active? Read the article and you'll understand what happens and why.

 

Advanced tooling for Web Services

 

Alessio Soldano has announced a new release of the JBossWS Maven plugin, as well as a new release of Wise, a tool for quick testing of Web Service endpoints, including a graphic UI.

 

A new Bean Validation Beta

 

If you are following the progress of the Bean Validation specification, Emmanuel Bernard has announced the release of the Bean Validation 1.1 Beta 4 proposed draft, that includes a number of very relevant enhancements.

 

Enterprise OSGi JPA support

 

Brett Meyer has published a blog entry showcasing a container-managed Enterprise OSGi JPA example based on Apache Karaf and Hibernate. 

 

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