Welcome to our penultimate JBoss Weekly Editorial for 2017 and my final ride through the JBoss Communities in search of all which is interesting and useful, I hope to have found something of interest to keep you busy as the year comes to a close.

Microservices with Vert.x

Vert.x is a small footprint, asynchronous framework which is ideally suited for Microservices applications; as examples of its capabilities and small footprint we have two excellent articles demonstrating its applicability on small footprint devices and the cloud.  In our first article Usman demonstrates how to run a small Vert.x application on a Raspberry Pi, part of his hobby project to control the behaviour of the Raspberry Pi using Google Home Mini and/or Alexa.  In our second article Lazar demonstrates how to integrate Vert.x with AWS Lambda, enabling small footprint, reactive, cloud based serverless applications to be developed and deployed at scale in the cloud.

Blockchain in the Cloud

Blockchain technology has been in the news for various reasons, not only as the basis for various cryptocurrencies but also as a decentralised application platform supporting smart contracts on top of the distributed ledger.  At a recent Red Hat Customer Forum event in Sydney, Australia a small team gave a live demonstration showing how a fictitious company called Destinasia Travel could leverage the power of the distributed ledger to implement a shared Loyalty Points system with many of their customers travel services.

Sagas and Narayana LRA

The Narayana transaction manager provides an implementation of the saga transactional pattern through Narayana LRA (Long Running Actions) however this is not the only framework available, in the first article this week from the transaction team Martin introduces three frameworks, Narayana LRA, Axon framework and Eventuate.io and compares their features and usability.  If you wish to learn more about sagas and how they differ from two-phase commit transactions then Ondra's article will walk you through the details, discussing compensation actions and their coordination as implemented in Narayana LRA.

Choosing between Apache Camel DSLs

When working with Apache Camel you have a choice to work with the XML or Java DSLs so how to you choose which is the better option?  The answer obviously depends a lot on your circumstances as well as how each option will fit in with your processes and team and in order to determine which to use you will first need advice on how they compare to each other.

JBoss Out and About

This has been a busy year for Infinispan with many of the team giving presentations at various conferences, user groups and other events, before heading out on his vacation Galder has provided a write-up of the year along with links to the appropriate presentations.

New Releases

• The Infinispan team announced the release of Infinispan 9.2.0.Beta2 and Infinispan 9.1.4.Final.
• The Arquillian team have announced the release of Arquillian Universe 1.1.15.1, Arquillian Universe 1.1.15.2, Arquillian Cube Extension 1.11.0 and Arquillian Core 1.2.0.Final.
• The Hibernate team have announced the release of Hibernate Validator 6.0.7.Final.
• The Keycloak team announced the release of Keycloak 3.4.2.Final.

That's all for this week, join us again next week when we will take our last tour of the year through the JBoss Communities to provide you with some interesting reading over the New Year.