Well, not all our news this week deal with it, but, yes, JudCon2013:Brazil, one of the big events for the JBoss community is round the corner. So, if you're in Sao Paolo next Friday and Saturday (April 19-20) or there's any chance for you to make plans for that, don't miss it!
Modularity in Ceylon (and also, some GSOC13 proposals)
Another interesting article on Ceylon this week. Stephane Epardaud takes on modularity in Java and provides a detailed overview of the main benefits and requirements of a modularity system, making a case as to why language-level support, backed by a solid repository system is a good idea, nay, a requirement for a modern language. Such a good one, that Ceylon has implemented it already.
So, if you're interested in Ceylon and would like to undertake a summer project, why not try one the proposals made by the team, which participates this year as part of the JBoss Community organization (and this would be a good time to check the other proposals as well)?
Dirtiness checking in Hibernate
Persistence frameworks like Hibernate simplify the work of developers in various ways. On one hand, the programming model allows manipulating persistent entities as domain objects directly, rather than interacting at the more verbose (albeit more tunable) SQL level. But another important benefit is supporting units of work that group together persistence operation and allow for the automatic persisting of modified entities. So, in this case it is important for the framework to detect if such entities have changed within the scope of a unit of work. Dirtiness checking is a non-trivial operation, and, often, various strategies are required. Steve Ebersole has published a detailed overview of the different options available in Hibernate, including the options, newly added in version 4.1, of delegating the decision to the application.
Infinispan gets a new release, and a server
Normally, we publish information about releases in a separate section, but this release of Infinispan (5.3.0.Alpha1) warrants a separate entry for a number of reasons. Not only it does come with a whole slew of new features, but it also includes a server component as a separate distribution, around a stripped version of JBoss AS7, containing only the services that are required for the data grid.
API improvements for compensation-based transactions
Writing compensating code for transactions can get pretty complicated, so the introduction of a declarative API for describing compensating methods in Narayana is a welcome addition for developers. Paul Robinson provides an introduction to it in his blog post.
Garbage collector performance comparison
Shane Johnson has published an interesting comparative overview of different garbage collector options and how do they affect performance, all in the context of using the JBoss Data Grid. This was all done in preparation for the Red Hat intel webinar earlier this week, the recording of which will be published shortly.
How to set up SOA Tooling in JBDS 7
Good tooling is important for designing any piece of software, but in the case of SOA, with its heightened level of abstraction, it plays an even more important role. JBoss Developer Studio provides good support in that respect, which, most importantly, improves with every edition. If you are interested how to set up SOA tooling in JBoss Developer Studio 7, Eric Schabell has published a blog entry describing how to do that.
Read JBoss documentation on Amazon Kindle
If you love ebook readers (as I do), you might find this little article very interesting. Vlastimil Elias shows how to use the Confluence to Kindle plugin for reading the JBoss documentation on Kindle.
Releases
This is all for this week, don't forget about the JudCon2013:Brazil next week, as well as submitting your proposals for Google Summer of Code 2013 on a JBoss Community project.
