Introducing xPaaS

For a number of years we, at JBoss, have been discussing PaaS in various forms including Enterprise PaaS, Integration PaaS and BPM as a Service.  We have been discussing each of these as independent components although each has obvious relationships with the others.  As a result we have recently announced an update to our PaaS strategy, a unified offering that we are calling xPaas.  Following the announcement, Mark Little has taken some time to present his thoughts on the topic and what can be expected over the coming weeks and months.

Embedded and Remote queries in Infinispan

The Infinispan team have recently introduced a new querying capability within their 6.0.0 codebase, intended to provide a way of running queries against cached entities using a simple filtering DSL and allowing the possibility of alternative query engines to be used while using the same query language/API.

Dynamic Index Sharding in Hibernate Search

Index Sharding has been a core capability of Hibernate Search for years however, until now, it has been necessary for the number of shards to be specified explicitly within the Hibernate Search configuration.  The 4.4.0.Beta1 release of HIbernate Search changes this by introducing a new feature, Dynamic Sharding, an introduction to which can be found in Sanne's post.

SwitchYard on OpenShift

Have you ever wanted to deploy SwitchYard applications in the cloud?  If so then Keith Babo has the answer for you.  In his latest video recording within the SwitchYard Video Series Keith shows how simple it is to create a new SwitchYard on OpenShift, how quickly an Application can be developed and how easy this application can be deployed into the OpenShift environment.

OptaPlanner and Vehicle Routing problems

Geoffrey has created a new video demonstrating how OptaPlanner can be used to optimise the planning of Vehicle Routes while delivery times are being constrained by specific time windows.

Presentations in the Cloud

Eric Schabell is well known for his presentations, many of which cover how best to use OpenShift.  In his latest post, Eric has decided to marry the two topics and demonstrate how easy it is to use OpenShift to publish presentations in the cloud, describing each of the steps that are necessary for deploying an example Awestruct presentation.

New Releases

• The Hibernate team has announced Hibernate ORM 4.2.6.Final
• The Ceylon team has announced Ceylon 1.0 beta
• The Infinispan team have announced Infinispan 6.0.0.Beta2
• The Teiid team have announced Teiid Designer 8.3 Beta 1 milestone
• The GateIn team have announced Portlet Bridge 3.3.0.Alpha3
• The Arquillian team have announced two release this week, Portal Extension 1.0.0.CR1 and Droidium 1.0.0.Alpha1

That is all for this week, please check back next week for more updates from the JBoss Communities.

Lots of interesting news from the JBoss world this week, especially as the preparations for Java One ramp up, but, more than usual, a significant number of news come from an area (management and monitoring) and a project (RHQ) which don't get a lot of talk, although they deserve it plenty. So this edition we will focus of them. The reason? Simple. We often focus on JBoss projects that, by their nature, target the development phase: frameworks, testing and development tools, and of course, the Wildfly application server (and JBoss EAP). It is to be expected - development is challenging, developing is fun, development is creative. But applications spend most of their time in production, where getting operational data is critical for understanding the health of the deployment, its behaviour in real usage scenarios and potential areas of improvement. So this week's editorial is dedicated to ...

What is RHQ and what is new?

RHQ is an enterprise management solutions for JBoss middleware projects - and beyond that, for Tomcat, Apache Web Server and numerous other server-side applications. It deals with critical aspects of the application while in production - such as: administration (changing parameters at runtime wherever that is desirable), monitoring (measuring the performance and understanding when it is satisfactory or not, but also helping pinpoint the specific areas that require improvement), and of course, sending alerts when things are out of control - a critical aspect of administering a live system. Besides the fact that it's useful, it can also produce cool charts like the one below. And now that you got your attention, we're going to point you to this link where you can check for yourself what an amazing project it is. Not before you read our editorial to the end.

So, onwards to our news: the first one is that RHQ has just released version 4.9 - with details being available here. It should come to reason that the release is accompanied by a rundown of the new features, and so it is:

• John Mazzitelli provides an overview of the new fine-grained security permissions in bundle provisioning, and a demo of the new GUI for availability updates for resources
• Jay Shaughnessy blogs about the RHQ group definitions enhancements,
• John Sanda provides a guide for upgrading RHQ from 4.8 to 4.9

And of course if we got you interested in the project, you may want to contribute to its development, by providing feedback or providing your opinion about certain features or directions that you'd like to see the project heading towards - for example, you can answer Heiko Rupp's question on improving RHQ's build process.

And if you missed the webinar this week on Red Hat JBoss Operations Network (which is the product offering based on RHQ), make sure you stay tuned for the video recording.

In brief

• The ModeShape team has provided a preview of their upcoming support for manually invoking sequencers, which will be part of the upcoming 3.6 release
• Lincoln Baxter III shows you how to view an aggregate log of all your OpenShift gears at once
• Tom Jenkinson, on behalf of the Narayana team, invites contributors to the project and provides a few guidelines on getting started on that
• Eric Shabell provides an overview of his upcoming Devoxx talk, an hour-long practical introduction to OpenShift
• Shane Johnson shares the results on his earlier poll, asking respondents whether they use (or need a data grid), musing on the results - in what concerns JBoss Data Grid and the future of in-memory data grids in general.
• Bryan Che introduces Red Hat Storage, explaining how open hybrid storage is one of the underpinnings of open hybrid cloud
• Kenny Peeples provides a practical introduction to Teiid and Business Intelligence, as well as on using JBoss Fuse and MQTT for communicating between Fuse and Android, in his Bitmoney demo
• Navin Surtani provides an account of the latest talk at the Singapore JBUG, where Ramkumar K.B. from the SCB bank of Singapore has presented the way in which they use Fuse for developing mobile applications
• Rob Davies provide an introduction to embedding Camel into ActiveMQ
• Eric Schabell shows the updates to a few of the demos for BRMS: the Cool Store, Rewards and Customer Evaluation

Releases

• The Arquillian team had a few releases had a release frenzy: Arquillian Extension QUnit 1.0.0.Alpha1, Arquillian Warp 1.0.0.Alpha4, Arquillian Graphene 2.0.0.Beta1, Arquillian Drone Extension 1.2.0.Beta2
• Hibernate ORM 4.3.0.Beta4
• ActiveMQ-CPP 3.8.0
• Infinispan 6.0.0.Alpha4