Welcome to another edition of the JBoss Editorial, join me in another trip through the JBoss Communities as we search for exciting developments and news from our projects.

Apache Kafka Streaming with Red Hat AMQ Streams

In a two part series discussing the development of an Apache Kafka Streams application, Adam walks us through all of the necessary steps to create an application using Red Hat AMQ Streams and the Streams Domain Specific Language.  The first article in the series discusses the creation of a simple containerised example application which can be used as the building block for the discussion within the second article when Adam shows how to create a more comprehensive pipeline using real world data, the Kafka Stream DSL and the Vertx Kafka client to compose an application which will process the events and visualise the outcome via a javascript dashboard.

Transactions, Object Stores and Expiry Scanners

Transactions are a feature which ensure applications behave correctly in the face of failures, handling the management of the resources enlisted in the transaction and coordinating their responses to achieve a consistent outcome.  Transactions are conceptually simple to use, however as with swans gracefully swimming the real work takes place under the surface where it's largely invisible to the majority of us.  The Narayana transaction manager is responsible for providing this feature within the Red Hat Middleware products but how does it work?  What is an Object Store?  How are failures handled?  How does recovery work?  How does expiry work?  Let's find out from Ondra ...

Monitoring jBPM using Prometheus and Grafana

The jBPM 7.21.0.Final release introduced a new Prometheus Kie Server Extension for publishing metrics related to the server and its runtime behaviour, enabling a deeper understanding of the server and the business processes.  In an article on the subject Cristiano explains how to enable  this extension, includes a short video showing it in action and provides a docker compose configuration for creating a local setup which you can use as a playground for exploring the integration with these tools.

Securing Web Applications using Elytron

Web applications deployed to WildFly can take advantage of the Elytron integration to require clients authenticate using X.509 certificates, this integration allows the server to not only verify the identity of the client but also use this identity to drive authorization within the application.  In a blog post on the subject Farah takes us through the steps to generate certificates, configure the server for CLIENT_CERT with mutual authentication and finally demonstrate the feature using a sample application.

Elytron also provides a credential store API/SPI which applications can use to manage the secure storage of credentials, check out Darran's blog post for more details and an example application showing how it can be used.

Camel Core Decomposition

The Camel team are very busy working towards the Apache Camel 3 release, with much work already having been done and three milestone releases under their belt.  One of the biggest efforts underway within milestone 4 is the decomposition of camel-core into smaller modules to allow applications to choose only those components they will need and help to minimise the size of the transitive dependency graph.

Customising the WildFly Console Title

The release of Hal 3.2.0, part of WildFly 17, now includes an option for customising the title of your console tab allowing you to better differentiate between different servers should you have multiple tabs open.  The new feature relies on two attributes within the management model, the name of the server and the organization it belongs to, which can be composed into the title through the settings page of the console.

Red Hat Decision Manager Workshop Refresh

With the release of Red Hat Decision Manager 7.3 Eric Schabell has been revisiting his free online workshop to align its content with the new release.  Eric has now updated the first two labs in the workshop covering the installation and the creation of a new project to be used within subsequent labs.

JBoss Out and About

Eric Schabell will be presenting at DevConf.us in Boston, an annual, free technology conference sponsored by Red Hat which will take place from August 17th to 19th.  Eric has three presentations accepted including "How to Jump Start Your Career in Open Source", "3 Pitfalls Everyone Ignores with Microservices" and "7 Steps to Expanding Your AppDev Toolbox".  Eric will also be in Raleigh, North Carolina for DevOps Days Raleigh which is taking place from October 1st to 2nd, Eric will be presenting "DevOps Heroes - Adding Automation Integration to your Toolbox"

Eric recently gave a keynote presentation during Red Hat Tech Day 2019 in Netherlands entitled "Open Key to Your Career".

New Releases

• The hibernate team have announced the release of
  • Hibernate Search 5.11.2.Final and 5.10.6.Final
  • Hibernate Search 6.0.0.Alpha7
• The Quarkus team have announced the release of Quarkus 0.17.0

That's all for this edition of the JBoss Editorial, please join us next time when we will take another journey through the JBoss communities in search of more news and articles.