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2017

Weekly Editorial

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Every week, the JBoss community releases some new software, but a lot of those releases are often framework or just bricks of more complex software (on this note, surprisingly, not Arquillian related release this week, for instance!). But this last week was different, because most of the releases where about products. Software you can run and deploy - and more importantly, use to implement solution to your problem. So, with new releases for Infinispan, Teiid, Keycloak, and even Windup, I'm calling it : it's raining (good) software !

 

Evangelist's Corner

 

As always, the JBoss evangelist have been busy releasing interesting content in the last days. The ever prolific Eric D. Schabell wrote an interesting article on how to add complex business logic to processes with JBoss BPM, but also took some time to discuss the upcoming Devoxx France 2017: Ready for AppDev, Cloud and a Circus? And while on the topic of BPM & BRMS, an excellent technical article on how the KIE Server Router integrated with workbench has also been released.

 

On her side, Christina Lin discussed Applying API Best Practices in Fuse on the RHD Blog. Given the importance of API, and their importance, in ensuring that business runs smoothly, it is most definitely a crucial topic.

 

Explore new territories with Infinispan & Keycloak

 

Last week saw the release of both new Infinispan version (with Infinispan 9.0.0.Beta2 and 8.2.6.Final are out!) and Keycloak (Keycloak 2.5.1.Final Released), but also the release of a couple of interesting articles discussing their new feature or architecture changes. The first one is actually the second part of an ongoing article regarding Data Container Changes in Infinispan (Part 2). Just behind this one, an other article covers the JDBC Store Improvements made in Infinispan 9.x. On the Keycloak side of the action, Administer Keycloak server from shell with Admin CLI was released, documenting quite neatly how to managed and automate easily, regular operation - such as creating use or changing a password, with a Keycloak server.

 

Technical bytes

 

On top of the previous articles, there was two noteworthy articles released last week. The first one discussed how to use Vert.x conjointly to AMQP to Build services and APIs (Vert.x, AMQP). The other one is actually a series of articles, as this is the now regular Hibernate Community Newsletter 2/2017. If you have any interest in a project (or several) from the Hibernate community, this newsletter is going to be a treasure trove for you.

 

Releases, releases, releases...

 

As mentioned above, there was certainly some very interesting releases last week - not just update of frameworks, but releases of products - so a lot of things to look at and explore :

 

Decaf'


As always, after binging on Java for a little while, it also nice to get one head out of coffee cup, and take a look at what is happening around it. So, for the JavaScript enthusiasts out there, I'm pretty sure the following article on  Data Encapsulation vs. Immutability in Javascript – RHD Blog will be a treat ! If you are more into Docker these days - who is not ? - take a look at how ManageIQ might make your life easier :Container Images Compliance – what we built at ManageIQ to remove a security pain point – part 1 – RHD Blog

Welcome to another edition of the JBoss Weekly Editorial, our regular trek through the JBoss Communities to catch up with their news

 

Microservices are Here to Stay

 

With many applications moving towards Microservices architectures we are seeing an explosion in the number of services being developed and deployed, something proving hard to manage with our pre-existing tools and techniques.  In order to handle these new architectures we need to begin looking at alternative environments especially Cloud Native Platforms, such as Kubernetes, which are better suited to handle the deployment and management of these services with minimal interaction.

 

Having explored  the environment and tooling  needed to support Microservices  it is time to focus on how we adapt our existing processes and applications.  Eric was recently invited to give a presentation entitled "Using Containers to Build a Microservices Architecture" in which he concentrates on the journey you will follow when switching over to Microservices, his slides are now available and a recording of his presentation can also be obtained by signing up to the event.

 

The next problem you will likely face when deploying Microservices relates to the monitoring of those services and collation of the metrics, a task greatly complicated by the number of services being deployed and the distribution of those services over many nodes.  To address this requirement the Hawkular team have introduced the Hawkular OpenShift Agent, an infrastructural service responsible for monitoring all the pods deployed on each node and sending metrics to Hawkular Metrics.  Hawkular OpenShift Agent is not the only option for providing metrics however as Hawkular Metrics can integrate with other tools such as Dropwizard Metrics, a popular metrics framework used within java applications.

 

Bean Validation 2.0 Progress

 

JSR 380, the Bean Validation 2.0 Spec, began its journey through the JCP a few months ago however there has already been significant progress.  With a focus on updating the existing specification to take advantage of Java 8 features the Expert Group has begun its work by adding support for JSR 310, the Data and Time API, and taking advantage of the additional locations for annotations to enhance the validation of Collections and other containers.  Gunnar Morling, the Red Hat representative on the committee, has more information on these new features and where the EG is heading next.

 

Pluggable Task Assignments with jBPM 7

 

Nearly all Business Processes will, at some point, involve user interactions and the assignment of tasks to ensure the job is completed however there are numerous options for how this assignment can be handled.  Tasks are traditionally assigned to a specific actor, multiple actors or groups however each has their issues.  In order to better handle this situation  jBPM 7 also provides a pluggable mechanism for handling task assignment along with two potential strategies which can be used.  Maciej has more information for those of you who are interested in learning more about the benefits of this approach and some of the issues you may face if using traditional assignment.

 

New Releases

 

 

Thank you for joining me in this week's Editorial, please come back next week when we will bring you more updates from the JBoss Communities.

I am looking forward to a great 2017 with the JBoss Community Projects and Red Hat Products.  As always the community continues to provide great technologies and projects.  This week provided some great Releases and Articles.

 

Now on to the happenings in our open source community!

 

Releases

 

  • Hibernate Validator 5.4.0.CR1 Provides some improvements and fixes:
    • We improved the javax.money support with a new annotation @Currency
    • Marko Bekhta finished his work on the annotation processor: we are now on a par with the Hibernate Validator engine features
    • We also fixed a possible overflow issue in java.time validation reported by Stanislav Bashkyrtsev
  • Immutant 2.1.6 includes the following changes:
    • Update to Ring 1.5.1 to address a security vulnerability. This vulnerability only affects applications that are running from the filesytem, not from an uberjar or war, so most users aren't affected.
    • Remove our dependency on Potemkin. This was a common source of collision with other application dependencies, so we now use an internal copy of Potemkin under different namespaces so it doesn't conflict.

    • A minor update of the version of tools.nrepl on which we depend (0.2.11 -> 0.2.12)

  • Arquillian Cube Extension 1.0.0.Alpha16 includes alot of enhancements and bugfixes.

  • Byteman 4.0.0-BETA2 is a early access release for JDK 9
  • Hybernate Search 5.5.6.Final contains alot of bugfixes
  • Teiid 9.2 Beta1 includes highlights since Alpha2:
    • TEIID-4627 Source Triggers to handle source change events.
    • TEIID-4643 Encrypt/decrypt functions were added for 128bit AES.
  • Arquillian Core 1.1.12.Final includes dependency updates and some improvements
  • Arquillian Tomcat Container 1.0.0.CR9 contains Arquillian Tomcat Adapters

 

Business Processes and Rules Highlights

 

 

Fuse Highlights

 

  • Christina Lin shared her recommendations on API best practices:
    • Intuitive-  It must be easy to understand and use without documentations.
    • Stable-  Not only it should be running but with good performance too.
    • Demands -  Creating useful functionally, no matter how nicely your API is documented, how easy it is to use, it people don't need it, they won't call it.
  • Claus Ibsen shared a podcast from Java Pub House posted on 7th of January 2017 where Freddy Guime and Bob Hollin talk about Apache Camel.

 

Additional Highlights

 

 

Thanks for being a part of the JBoss Community and stay tuned for the next Weekly Editorial!

 

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Kenneth Peeples, Shadow-Soft Director of Technical Services

kpeeples@shadow-soft.com

@ossmentor

www.shadow-soft.com

To those of you in a geography that recently incremented its year counter: Happy New Year! This week much of the JBoss community is returning refreshed from the holiday break. And on their return we've seen the usual flurry of releases and useful tutorials and demos...

 

Getting Started with Fuse Integration Service 2.0 Tech preview

In this post Christina Lin walks us through the steps needed to get started with Fuse Integration Service 2.0 (Tech preview). There’s even a video to make it easier to follow along.

 

App Dev in the Cloud - HR Employee Rewards Application on OpenShift

In this Blog post, Eric presents an update to his "HR Employee Rewards Application” demo application. In this update he’s fully containerized the application and shown how it can be ran on the OpenShift Container Platform.

 

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