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

• The Hibernate team have announced the release of Hibernate ORM 5.2.7, Hibernate ORM 5.1.4.Final and Hibernate ORM 5.0.12.Final.

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.