We start this week with a couple of topics that have been receiving some controversial cover in various communities.

Banks don't use ACID transactions, at least that is what some people are now saying after reading a blog post which comes to that conclusion.  The reality, however, is not as simple as that post would suggest as the solution employed will depend on the particular requirements of the problem being solved; there are occasions when the solution requires ACID semantics and others where these semantics can be relaxed.  Mark Little has written two blog posts on this topic, the first as a response to the reaction created by the original post and a second on some of the possibilities that are available when your requirements call for ACID semantics but, for whatever reason, this is unachievable.

XACML has also been getting a bit of attention of late, thanks to a blog post by Andras Csar of Forrester who has declared it to be dead, but is this the opinion of the industry?  The situation, as I am sure you can imagine, is more complicated than that post would suggest and the answer depends on who you ask and what it is that they are trying to achieve.  Anil Saldhana, who participated in the creation of the OASIS XACML v3 specification and is co-chair on the OASIS Cloud Authorization TC, has written a post discussing Andras' views and providing his opinions on the future of XACML and alternatives.

Have you ever wondered what goes on within a conference Program Committee?  How do they go about choosing presentations?  Do you want some advice on how to get your abstract noticed?  If so then Michael Istria may be able to help.  Michael was recently invited to play a part in the Program Committee for EclipseCon France, an experience which he enjoyed, and has written about his experience, how the PC worked and how you can improve your chances of success in the submission process.

If you have ever had to use an HTTPS connection within java then you are likely to be aware of the need to set the trustStore system property.  This solution, however, forces you to use the same trust store for all your connections but what can you do if you need to use different trust stores per connection?  If this is one of your requirements then John Mazzitelli has a solution for you, allowing you to ignore the system property and specify the trust store on each connection.

Eric Schabell has written a post introducing a demo project, written by Red Hat UK Solutions Architects to pull together six of the Red Hat JBoss products.  Eric, as you would expect, has taken this a step further and extracted the Car Insurance Demo into a standalone demo framework so that it will be easy for you to run locally.

JBoss on the Road

Randall Hauch has had a busy few weeks travelling to South America, where he presented at JUDCon Brazil, followed by a trip to Cologne, Germany, where he presented at NoSQL Matters, Grenoble, France, where he presented at Alpes JUG and finally Geneva, Switzerland, where he presented at Geneva JUG.

Two others who were present at JUDCon Brazil were Gabriel Cardoso, who gave an interesting presentation on what is required when Designing a New User Interface for Open Source Projects, and Galder Zamarreño, who gave presentations on Infinispan's implementation of the JCache API and how Infinispan can be used as Hibernate's second level cache.

Claus Ibson has recently travelled to Århus, Denmark where he gave a presentation, in Danish naturally, on Apache Camel.

Finally Gunnar Morling attended Berlin Expert Days where he gave a presentation entitled "Bean Validation 1.1 - What's Cooking?"

Upcoming Events

Next week sees Marek Goldman giving his first ever presentation at GeeCON, hosted in Kraków, starting at 11:40am on Wednesday 15th.

The following week will see Mark Proctor deliver a presentation to the London JBUG covering "What's new in Drools 6.0".  If you are in London, and free on May 22nd, then head along to what promises to be a very interesting presentation.

June 9th to June 14th will see a number of conferences taking place at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston, USA.  The excitement kicks off with JUDCon 2013: UnitedStates (June 9th - June 11th) followed by CamelOne 2013 (June 10th - June 11th), Red Hat Developer Exchange (June 11th) and finally Red Hat Summit (June 11th - June 14th).  Each of these conferences will be well attended by many of the core JBoss developers and provides one of the best opportunities to meet, talk and work with some of the best in the business.  If you are unsure what will be covered by these conferences then Ray Ploski and Mike Brock can help, both posting their thoughts on what you can expect to see and learn at JUDCon, Camel One and Red Hat Developer Exchange.  Stéphane Épardaud also provides some information on a 4 hour, hands-on lab that he, Gavin King and Emmanuel Bernard will be presenting on Ceylon.

New Releases

This week sees a multitude of releases from a diverse set of projects.

We start the list with two projects that have each announced two releases

• the hibernate team releasing Hibernate Validator 5.0.1 and Hibernate ORM 4.3.0.Beta2
• the Arquillian team releasing Arquillian Container GlassFish 1.0.0.CR4 and Arquillian Drone Extension 1.2.0.Alpha2

In addition to this we have a number of projects announcing final releases

• the TorqueBox team releasing TorqueBox 2.3.1
• the JGroups team releasing JGroups 3.3.0.Final
• the RHQ team releasing RHQ 4.7

and a number that are announcing beta releases

• the Teiid team releasing Teiid 8.4 Beta2
• the jBPM team releasing jBPM 6.0 Beta2
• the Infinispan team releasing Infinispan 5.3.0.Beta1

With this amount of activity there must be something that piques your interest!