It has been a few weeks since we last provided an update on the activities within our Communities and for that we apologise.  With this edition of our Weekly Editorial we are hoping to rectify this mistake and take you on a trek through not one, not two but three weeks full of news.  I hope you enjoy the experience and find something of interest.

 

New Foray into Serverless

 

Emmanuel recently wrote a post describing some of the efforts taking place within the Fabric8 Funktion project to explore serverless architectures.  In their experiments they discovered a remarkable performance improvement when replacing 'if' branches within serverless functions with invocations to an 'if' method, something they are calling IF as a Service (IFAAS).  While not part of the current MVP they have also been experimenting with defining 'else' statements as functions although 'for' loops are proving problematic.  If you are interested in learning more about this initiative then head over to ifaas.io or look for advice beside the date on the original article.

 

Hawkular Monitoring and Alerting

 

This week we have a number of articles on Hawkular technologies, a set of OpenSource projects focussing on Monitoring and Alerting solutions of applications and deployments within standalone, on-premise and Cloud environments.

 

In the first article of the week we investigate the trade-offs we need to consider when determining how best to adjust the sampling rates for applications being traced within a distributed environment.  Should this be an application driven decision or an infrastructural driven decision?  Should this be driven through static configuration or dynamic configuration?

 

Our second article continues the distributed tracing theme by discussing how the OpenTracing standard will be supported within the upcoming Apache Camel 2.19 release and covers how to explicitly instrument a camel application, how to achieve the same using the Spring Boot annotations, how to integrate the OpenTracing java agent and examples demonstrating the distributed tracing functionality in action.

 

The third article introduces a new tool for monitoring java applications, the hawkular java agent, while our fourth article introduces the Hawkular OpenShift agent which can retrieve metrics from pods exposing Prometheus or Jolokia endpoints.

 

Our final article introduces Hawkular Alerting, a component which enables the querying of Elasticsearch servers with results emitted as Hawkular Events.

 

Bean Validation 2.0 Alpha2 is out

 

The Alpha2 version of the Bean Validation 2.0 API and Spec is now available including improvements and clarifications related to the validation of container elements, new constraints based on feedback from the Community and an updated TCK.  If you wish to try out these features within your tests then Gunnar demonstrates how this can be achieved using WildFly 10.

 

Google Summer of Code

 

JBoss is again taking part in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) as a mentoring organisation, GSoC is an initiative lead by Google to encourage participation in OpenSource.  The deadline for submitting proposals has now passed and we have moved on to the second phase, evaluating proposals to determine which to accept.  Good luck to all of you who are involved!

 

Pushing Notifications with Red Hat Mobile Application Platform

 

Delivering notifications to clients using the Red Hat Mobile Application Platform is a very simple task with the platform allowing for notifications to be sent to all devices which are subscribed to a particular 'category' as well as to an explicit set of specified users.

 

Integrating Keycloak with Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services

 

One of the interesting capabilities of Keycloak is the ability to use external services as brokered identity providers, for many this will mean integrating with Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services.  Setting this up is not as daunting a task as it may sound, Hynek has provided details for all the steps for both Keycloak and Active Directory.

 

Accessing the BRMS Internal Git Repo within a Container

 

When running BRMS in a standalone, on-premise environment you may have accessed the BRMS internal Git repository using your development tooling, if you have tried to do the same when running within OpenShift then you will have quickly realised this feature is not enabled by default.  Rectifying this is straight forward as Eric demonstrates in his Tips & Tricks series, allowing you to once again gain access to that internal repository via your tooling.

 

Get Ready to Migrate, jBPM 7 is Coming

 

With the upcoming release of jBPM 7 it is now time to understand the necessary steps for migrating from your current jBPM 6.5 installation.  The migration is a reasonably simple process but will involve migrating your workbench, database and updating the configuration of the new KIE server.

 

Scala Support in Vert.x

 

The Vert.x team have recently added support for Scala as a language binding, providing support for all Vert.x modules.  The team also provide a quickstart showing the integration in action, discuss testing using ScalaTest and demonstrate how to make asynchronous invocations using Scala Futures.

 

Hibernate News

 

This week we are fortunate to highlight two issues of the Hibernate Community Newsletter.  In Newsletter 6/2017 you will find articles discussing the differences between first and second level caches, how to implement the soft delete pattern, integrating Hibernate Search with Spring Boot, DTO projections when using JPA and many more.  In Newsletter 7/2017 you will find articles discussing how to identify statements which lead to a failure during batch processing, integrating with CockroachDB, mapping one-to-many relationships, implementing multitenancy and more.

 

C++ Clients for Infinispan

 

When integrating clients with Infinispan it is natural to think in terms of what can be done through the Java clients but did you know that Infinispan 8.1.0 added the ability for C++ hotrod clients to receive and process events?  Not only can you register a client listener with the hotrod server but you can also reference filters and converters deployed within the server.

 

Apache Camel is 10 years old!

 

On March 19th 2007 James Strachan submitted the very first commit to the Apache Camel codebase, originally created as a sub-project of ActiveMQ.  The first release of the project was made on July 2nd of the same year and it looks as if we can expect some celebrations to coincide with the anniversary of the release.

 

JBoss Out and About

 

Red Hat Summit 2017 will soon be upon us, taking place in Boston from May 2nd to May 4th.  This year we are trying something new, a Taste of Summit, through which you will get free access to many of the sessions from the conference and early access to session previews.  While there you should also check out the AppDev and DevOps labs.

 

Eric Schabell is attending a number of conferences to give his presentation entitled "App Dev in the Cloud".  His first appearance was at Codemotion Rome 2017 (slides available) and will be followed by QCon New York, June 26th to 30th, and All Things Open, Raleigh, North Carolina from October 23rd to 24th.

 

The Drools, jBPM and Optaplanner teams will soon be hitting the road to present at bpmNext, Santa Barbara from April 18th to 20th, and Red Hat Summit.  If you are interested in these technologies then check out the schedule of their presentations, especially the talk on Case Management given by Kris and Maciej.

 

The Hibernate OGM team will be presenting at Devoxx UK, taking place in London from May 11th to May 12th, while the Infinispan team will be presenting at Devoxx France, taking place in Paris from April 6th to April 7th.

 

Bilgin attended CloudNativeCon and KubeCon Europe 2017 where he gave his talk on Cloud Native Patterns (video and slides included) and listened to many other speakers giving their own presentations.

 

New Releases

 

 

That's all for this week, please join us again next week when we will resume our normal schedule for our Weekly Editorial releases.