Welcome to this week's Editorial, a summary of the news and events that have been happening throughout the JBoss Community.

Monitoring through RHQ

There has been a lot of work taking place within RHQ and associated projects this week, fortunately a number of the team have been busy writing articles describing the efforts under way.  In the first post of the week Heiko has written an article introducing the work being done to integrate RHQ monitoring with InfluxDB, highlighting this by demonstrating how to use RHQ and InfluxDB to monitor WildFly instances.  Thomas introduces the work being done on netty-collectd, the netty decoded for the collectd binary protocol, discusses the current status of the work and the plans to incorporate this work into ptrans, the protocol translator used within RHQ.  John describes how to use the new WildFly Extension Installer maven plugin, allowing RHQ to deploy a message broker directly into an existing WildFly or EAP installation and follows up with a second article discussing how a message broker can be used to send and receive Auditing events.

Arun's Tip Corner

Arun has written two tips for us this week, both of which have a cloud theme.  In his first tip of the week Arun explains how easy it is to manage OpenShift with command line tools by using those tools to provision an instance of  WildFly on OpenShift.  In his second tip of the week Arun introduces STOMP, the Simple Text Oriented Messaging Protocol, and demonstrates how STOMP can be used over the WebSockets API.  In his STOMP demonstration Arun creates an instance of ActiveMQ running on OpenShift and uses this as the STOMP server for a local instance of WildFly.

Infinispan: Soft-Index File Store and Map behaviour

The Infinispan team have recently introduced a new local file based Cache Store, the Soft-Index File Store, intended to address some of the drawbacks associated with the Single File Store, it uses a B+ tree implementation that is cached in memory and offloaded to the filesystem.  Radim has some more details of the cache store, including a discussion on the implementation details and its known limitations.

In versions of Infinispan preceding 7.0.0.Final the Map implementation would return the local node size, often confusing those who were coming across this behaviour for the first time; in Infinispan 7.0.0.Final this all changes.  The 7.0.0.Final release introduces a Distributed Entry Iterator, providing a memory efficient way to iterate over all entries in the cache and providing the basis for reimplementing some of the bulk methods such as size, now returning the size of the entire cluster rather than only the local node set.

Travelling and Rich Clients with Drools and jBPM

Business processes and rules engines can be put to use in many industries, providing solutions to complex problems that have a requirement for process, events and the evaluation of rules.  If you have an need for this type of solution, but perhaps find getting started to be a daunting proposition, then take a look at the Travel Agency Demo introduced by Eric Schabell.  The project was created by two of our UK colleagues, Niraj Patel and Shepherd Chengeta, and is a great example of a solution that encompasses process and rules engines.

Mark Proctor recently gave a presentation covering the UI efforts that are underway within the Drools and jBPM projects, demonstrating the technologies being developed and their flexibility when being used to implement web based UI.

Upcoming Ceylon Features

The Ceylon team are busy discussing the priorities for development tasks aimed at the 1.1.5 and 1.2 versions of Ceylon, asking the community for help in determining the direction.  During these discussions they have identified a number of new features to be added, both within the libraries and the languages syntax.  Check out Gavin's post on those features that are currently being worked on and remember to provide feedback to help shape the future of the Ceylon language.

Upcoming Fabric8 Changes

If you have been using Fabric8 to manage your Camel, ActiveMQ etc. deployments then you may already be aware that there is a big change being introduced with fabric8 2.0.  This will widen the scope of the applications that can be managed and will embrace Kubernetes and Docker.  For more information on what this means check out Rob's post where he discusses these upcoming changes.

Confused over Camel Endpoints?

Have you ever used Camel endpoints?  Have you struggled to find out how to configure those endpoints and achieve the behaviour  you are after?  If so then you will be very interested to hear that Camel 2.15 is introducing a new capability that enables endpoints to self-describe.  The endpoints will now have the ability to explain how they are configured and what each configuration option is used for.

JBoss Out and About

Gavin and Stéphane have recently been presenting Ceylon at some of the Java User Groups along the East Coast of the USA, for more information read Arun's write up of the event.

Arun and the Devoxx4Kids team recently ran an event during JavaOne 2014.  The event was very well attended with 136 kids turning up to learn about Arduino, Lego Mindstorms, Minecraft Modding and many more topics.

Next week sees the return of Devoxx to Antwerp, Belgium.  Eric Schabell will be delivering a University session on Monday afternoon showing everyone how easy it is to get started with xPaaS using OpenShift Cloud.

New Releases

- The AeroGear team have announced UnifiedPush Server 1.0.2.

- The Infinispan team have announced the release of Infinispan 7.0.0.Final.

- The Forge team have announced the release of Forge 2.12.2.Final.

- The Teiid team have announced the release of Teiid 8.9 CR3.

- The Arquillian team have announced the 1.0.0.Alpha7 release of Arquillian Extension Jacoco.

That's all for this week, please join us again next week when we will bring you more news and events from the JBoss Community.