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