Summer vacation is well underway, but innovation and creativity never take a break. So, while this period is surely much more quiet than the rest of the year, we can still enjoy delivering you great news about the latest developments in the world of JBoss. So, what happened in the last week?

JBoss Community Recognition Awards

The developer community is at the heart of every project in the JBoss portfolio, and it is the time now for it to award some of its members for the contributions in the past year. While voting has closed this week, stay in touch with us for the results of the vote and join us in congratulating the winners.

Progress on Ceylon M6

Gavin King has posted an update on the status of Ceylon M6, highligting a few of the upcoming features - while the milestone release may arrive later than initially expected, the extra time spent refinining the functionalities of the language is worth it!

The convergence of data stores

Shane Johnson writes about a new trend in the world of Big Data: it is harder to draw a line between different data stores, and group them in the traditional categories of data stores, NoSQL databases, etc., the new generation of data stores are more integrated, borrowing characteristics and features from each other.

The rules of Fight Club, Java Edition

You've read them as they were published, but now Shane Johnson has summarized his not-quite-a-comparison-of-Spring-and-Java-EE series of posts here. While the debate, as old as enterprise Java, rages on, it is important to remember that there's a deeper meaning behind labels and oversimplification does a great disservice to the correct understanding of the technology landscape. Shane's post helps a lot in clarifying that.

LESS is more (for Errai)

Often overquoted, "less is more" is very true with respect to the latest developments of Errai. In his blog, Erik-Jan de Wit describes the newly added support for LESS in Errai, which will be part of the upcoming 2.4 and 3.0 releases, adding better support for modern UI design in Java EE-powered applications.

EJB invocation over HTTP in WildFly 8.0.0.Alpha3

Jaikiran Pai has posted a detailed account of the "single open port" feature of WildFly, which builds upon Undertow's HTTP Upgrade support. A single port of communication eases the operations part of runing an application server a great deal, as it greatly simplifies the setup of administration (think firewalls, vertical clustering and so on). A direct application of this principle is the newly added support for EJB invocations over HTTP.

Support for aborting slow consumers in ActiveMQ 5.9

Tim Bish has blogged about a new feature of the upcoming ActiveMQ 5.9 release - based on last acknowledgement time.

GateIn new features and enhancements

Stian Thorgersen has published a post that contains a brief description and a number of reference points for getting more information about GateIn's Java API. Another important recent enhancement to GateIn was the addition of new CDI scopes, reflecting portlet-specific actons. Ken Finnigan writes in more detail about it here.

Releases

• A few releases for the Arquillian project
  • Arquillian Container for Tomcat 1.0.0.CR5
  • Arquillian Container Jetty 1.0.0.CR2
  • Arquillian Container WebSphere AS 1.0.0.Alpha1
• Rewrite 2.0.5.Final
• JBPM Migration Tooling v0.12
• JBoss Tools 4.1.0.Final and JBoss Developer Studio 7.0.0.GA

Sightings and upcoming events

• Meet an Open Project Day, on July 24 - organized by the London Java Community, this week's event featured Hibernate Search, represented by Sanne Grinovero
  
• JBug Scotland - on August 28, focusing on the JBoss Way
  
• JBoss One Day Talk - on October 23rd in Munich (yes, we know there's a lot of time until then, but - get your agenda ready)
  

I am sure many of you are enjoying some warm July vacation time, hopefully you are still reading these blog posts and tweets on your mobile device at the beach!  :-)

Mobile Screencasts:  While many of the JBoss team are taking some much needed downtime after the ramp up for Red Hat Summit, there are still key members of the overall team cranking out some great stuff.  I love the new screencasts created by the GateIn team to show off some of the new mobile capabilities.   Check out this blog post or if you want the direct access to the videos then check out www.vimeo.com/jbossdeveloper.   We have 181 videos published and this is a great resource for digging into JBoss technologies.  

Visual Regex Tester: Lincoln has created a great video/screencast of his Visual Regex Tester.   Let's face it, most of us have not memorized the regex syntax so having a tool is great.

CDI + JSF in your Portlets:  Ken Finnegan blogs about the new edition of the Portlet Bridge, where you can build JSF pages, leveraging Java EE 6 dependency injection and use them in the portal container.   In addition, you can use CDI for injection directly into your non-JSF-based portlets.  Check out Ken's blog demonstrating the simple @Inject code.

Well, the CapeDwarf is back from vacation and if you have a need to create portable Google App Engine to Java EE-based apps then this is the project for you!  Even Gartner is talking about our CapeDwarf project - vendor lockin (even by Google) has never been popular so make sure to check it out.

BeanValidation 1.1: Gunnar Morling has produced a great feature spotlight on BeanValidation 1.1's EL capabilities.

Wise on OpenShift: Wise is an awesome tool for the dynamic invocation of SOAP services and now it is available for the public to use at Openshift.   I just tried it out for stock quotes and "RHT". 

Aerogear 1.1.2: Yes, JBoss does JavaScript - with the Aerogear project. 

Java EE vs Spring: The first rule of fight club...Shane has crafted some interesting rules for having the Java EE vs Spring smackdown - heavy vs light, real standards vs defacto standards and monolithic vs modular.  It is a fun read and I encourage you to go check it out.