If you work with the JBoss Community on a regular basis then you will already be aware of the fantastic contributions that come in from all areas with each of the projects having a vibrant community that, through quality submissions, helps to develop and define the direction of those projects; but every now and again something completely unexpected comes along.  Community member Christos Vasilakis has done just that.  While working in his spare time, Christos decided to develop an impressive iPhone app to help with the remote administration of JBoss AS 7 servers and has now released version 1.0 of this app.  You can find more details about it, including how to get hold of the source code, in his announcement.  If you are interested in how this app works alongside JBoss Tools then Max has already answered this, having created a screencast which demonstrates both in action.

JBoss AS 7.1 now on OpenShift

Pete has written an article introducing the availability of JBoss AS 7.1 on OpenShift, the RedHat Platform-as-a-Service (Paas) provider.  As part of this announcement the team have put together a series of videos demonstrating how quickly you can deploy a mobile ready application to the cloud, deploy and consume REST services, take advantage of high performance messaging and much more.  Additional videos are planned for the series so pleae keep checking the Vimeo channel for updates.

Migrating to Java EE6

Shane continues his fantastic series with another three posts discussing the issues encountered when upgrading the JBoss Trading application from a Java EE5 based application to a Java EE6 based application.  In these final three parts he covers

- Part III - the final configuration modifications required to support the structure introduced in Part II

- Part IV - the source code and configuration changes required for deployment of the EJB/REST/WS clients and integration tests

- Part V - the final part covering the cleanup of source code and configuration for deployment, integration and performance testing

In another post about migration, Ray Ploski introduces part 3 of a series on how to migrate from Spring to Java EE 6.  The series, written by Bert Ertman and Paul Bakker of Luminis, goes into great depth on the rationale behind the migration and demonstrates, through real world examples, not only how to upgrade the application but also how it can be tested using Arquillian.

RichFaces and Twitter Bootstrap

The RichFaces team have recently begun an effort to integreate the RichFaces CDK with Twitter Bootstrap, thanks in no small part to community member Paul Dijou.  Brian has written an article introducing the work and discussing some of his favourite components.  You will also be able to find details on hoe to run the current demo and, if you would like to join the fun, on how to get involved with the future development.

Drools Planner benchmarking goes multi-threaded

Lukáš Petrovický has recently submitted modifications to Drools Planner in order to enable support for multi-threading during benchmarking.  Geoffrey has written an article introducing the new functionality, describing how it can be enabled and demonstrates some of its obvious benefits.

A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence

As part of the preparations for the Drools 5.4 release, Mark Proctor has recently updated the introductory documentation to include a fascinating, brief history of Artificial Intelligence.  Well worth a read if you are even remotely interested in this interesting topic.

Releases for the week

The TorqueBox team have quickly followed up on their last release by releasing TorqueBox 2.0.3.

The Hibernate team have two releases this week

• Hibernate Validator 4.3.0.Final
• Hibernate Search 4.1.1.Final

The Weld team have released Weld 1.1.8.Final.

The latest version of the JBoss AS7 Management Console, version 1.3.0 is now available.

The Errai team have just released the first release in their latest and greatest series, Errai 2.0 is now available for download.

The Portal team have released the third beta of their next major release, Portlet Bridge 3.0.0.Beta3.

The RHQ team have also annouced the release of RHQ 4.4 released.

That's all for this week, make sure that you check back next week to catch up on all that is happening within the JBoss Community.

Another week goes by and the productivity and diversity of JBoss and its Communities continues to be demonstrated through their numerous articles and releases.  What better way to keep up with these events than by reading your Weekly Editorial.

JBoss AS 7.1

The recent release of JBoss AS 7.1 continues to spur postings from those who are working in related areas.  This week is the turn of Max Andersen who has written a series of posts describing the AS features that he has been more closely involved with.

"What am I excited about?" introduces the series and explains how to work around the one issue which may surface if you are trying to get JBoss Tools 3.3 M5 to work with AS 7.1.  The series continues with a discussion on "Deployable Datasources" and "Developer Friendly Security" before finishing with his last post entitled "Quickstarts Frenzy".

Ceylon

If you have been following what has been happening within the Ceylon community then you will already be aware of the tremendous advances they have been making over the last few months.  Recently they have taken another big step forward in enabling interoperability with Ceylon and Java.  Take a look at Gavin's post, "Trying out Ceylon's Java Interop", to discover what is now possible within the Ceylon language.

WebSockets vs REST?

Mark Little has a knack of writing thought provoking posts and "WebSockets vs REST" is no different.  In this article he covers a number of the discussions which are currently being held about the relationship between WebSockets and REST.  Are they complementary technologies?  Are they competing technologies?  Join the discussion and add your thoughts.

Drools - Community Health, Games and Employee Rosters

In "Measuring Risk via Community Health" Mark Proctor discusses some of the concerns which surface when deciding to adopt new technologies and how confidence can often be gained from looking at the health of the communities behind the technologies.  He also found time to post a video showing how to build a graphical game in 20 mins using Drools; who said that you couldn't have fun with rules engines?

Geoffrey has already demonstrated how Drools Planner can be used to solve problems such as "The Travelling Salesman"; now he turns his attention to another common problem, the scheduling of an employee roster.

Marshalling within Errai

The ability to marshall objects within GWT presents the developer with particular challenges that are not encountered within java.  In "Errai Marshalling: Good for Immutable Types" Jonathan Fuerth describes an Errai solution to the problem, demonstrating how to marshall mutable beans, immutable beans and handle creation through the use of the factory method pattern.

Metawidget and AeroGear

Richard Kennard has recently been working with the AeroGear team on a "proof of concept" which aims to integrate JBoss Forge and Metawidgets, enabling the development of mobile applications based on POH5 and JQuery.  Take a look at his article to find out where things currently stand.

BoxGrinder in Fedora 17

The BoxGrinder team have recently been investigating the changes which are necessary to support BoxGrinder over three Fedora releases (15, 16 and 17).  In "Preparing for Fedora 17", Marc Savy describes some of the issues that were discovered and how they managed to address them across the different releases.

Caching within Immutant

The Immutant project supports the development of Clojure applications within an environment that allows integration with various JBoss technologies.  In the next article in their "Getting Started" series, Jim Crossley explores how the integration with Infinispan enables caching features that can be used within Clojure applications.

Infinispan out and about

The Infinispan team will be giving a number of presentations over the next few weeks, spreading the word on Infinispan and its capabilities.

Manik is currently visiting the US and will be presenting at the Wisconsin Java User Group, on 1st March, followed by visits to the Chicago JBUG on the 5th of March and the DC Area JBug on 14th of March.

Mircea with be at CodeMotion in Rome, presenting his "Infinispan in 50 minutes" talk on the 23rd of March.  He follows that with a visit to Miracle Open World, being held in Billund, Denmark between 18th-20th April, to give his presentation describing how Radargun is used to help measure Infinispan's performance.

Galder will be staying closer to home, presenting "Infinispan and Datagrid" at Alpes JUG in Grenoble on the 29th of March.

Drools takes on London

The 8th of March sees the Drools team arrive in London for a full morning of presentations on Drools & jBPM technologies.  Take a look at the agenda and sign up before all the places have been taken.  Remember, spaces are limited.

Releases

Another busy week for the projects with numerous releases appearing in the usual places.

• The ModeShape team have announced the release of ModeShape 2.8.0.Final
• Steven has announced the release of Teiid 7.7 Final
• Brian has announced the release of RichFaces 4.2.0.Final
• Lincoln has announced the release of JBossForge 1.0.0.Final
• Anil has announced the release of PicketLink 2.0.2.Final
• Galder has announced the release of Infinispan 5.1.2.CR1
• Emmanuel has announced the release of Hibernate Search 4.1 CR1 & 3.4.2 and includes a discussion on the main benefit of the release, the ability to intercept indexing operations.
• The Errai team have announced the release of Errai 2.0.Beta2
• Jesper has announced the latest alpha release of IronJacamar, IronJacamar 1.1.0.Alpha6, and describes the first new feature in the 1.1 series: Lazy Connection Manager.
• The Arquillian team have announced the release of Arquillian Extension Android 1.0.0.Alpha1

That's all for this week.  Check back next week for more information about JBoss and its vibrant Communities.

It is time for another update from the JBoss Community and we are finishing the month in style.  We have news, new releases, conference updates and good, solid technical posts.

JBoss AS "Tesla" Beta is out

The JBoss AS team have been hard at work and, only two months after having released JBoss AS 7.0.2 "Arc", have announced the first beta of JBoss AS 7.1.0 "Tesla".  This is a significant step towards support of the EE full profile and includes many new additions, not least of which is support for EJB 2.x and remote client invocations.

There are many more improvements and additions so don't take my word for it!  Read the announcement, download the server and take it for a spin.

JBoss Tools, as you would expect, has support for the new version but there is one issue which requires a small change to the startup configuration before they can be used together.  Max has written a good post describing the issue and walks you through the simple process of updating your server configuration.

Ceylon continues at pace

Two weeks ago the Ceylon team unveiled the Ceylon website and provided access to a pre-release version of the IDE.  As if to prove that nothing within the community ever stands still, they have now released an updated pre-release version of the IDE.  Emmanuel has posted an update describing some of the things that have happened over the last two weeks and the some of the reasons for the update.

If you are in Mexico City on the 17th of December, and are looking for something to do, then try and catch Gavin's talk about Ceylon.  It will be the first time he has given the talk in Spanish!

Seam and future directions

Shane has written an extensive post about the next step in the future of Seam, discussing many of the concerns that have so far been raised. 

If you have any interest in Seam then it is a must-read, helping to shed light on the reasons for the changes that are currently underway.

Part of his posting also talks about the Apache DeltaSpike project, the proposal for which has now been submitted to the Apache Incubator.  This is going to be a very interesting project to watch especially as it combines three very active communities under one umbrella.

All these changes have involved a great deal of time and effort, from people on all sides, to get everything to this point; time and effort that are recognised by everyone including Mark Little.  There are going to be more exciting announcements over the coming months so watch this space for further details.

Arquillian updates

Arquillian is a JBoss project that should be part of everyone's testing toolbox, greatly simplifying the test logic involved in integration testing.  If you are not already using it then take a look at the presentation from Devoxx 2011 and ask yourself "why not?".

The Arquillian team have recently released updates to a number of their sub projects

• Arquillian Core 1.0.0.CR6, the core of the Arquillian toolkit.
• Arquillian Drone 1.0.0.CR3, with upgraded Selenium, improved WebDrvier configuration and fixes to the cleanup of method scoped browsers.
• OpenWebBeans Container 1.0.0.CR2, including support for OpenWebBeans 1.1 and WebArchive deployments
• Jacoco 1.0.0.Alpha2, now including support for coverage of classes within nested archives.

Dan has also been working on an Arquillian Extensions Plugin for JBoss Forge, making a rough cut of it available through the github project.

JUDCon 2012: India

The deadline for submitting papers has now passed and the selection process has begun.  We will soon know the content and schedule for the conference but, rest assured, whatever is chosen will be of a high quality and aimed at the Developer audience.

If you are intending to go to the conference, held on January 24th and 25th, then make sure you apply for your ticket before the Very Early Bird Fee expires at midnight on the 3rd of December!

Conference Roundup & Travel

Two weeks ago was a very busy week, with lots of JBoss developers and Community members presenting at a number of conferences.  We now have some more posts to share with you including

• the slide deck from the Portal presentation at JUDCon
• Dimitris' recap of Devoxx 2011
• Mircea's summary of Infinispan@Devoxx
• Andrew's description of his month long tour, alongside Lincoln and Dan

and don't forget the Arquillian slides from above

More JBoss Releases

As if all that wasn't enough, take a look at some of the other release which were made this week

• Teiid 7.6 Final was announced, adding numerous improvements to this, already impressive, Data Virtualisation System
• Hibernate Core 4.0.0 CR7 has been released, focussing on performance and bugs
• RichFaces 4.1.0 CR1 is out, another stepping stone on the way towards 4.1.0 Final
• GateIn Portal 3.2.0 Beta01, the first view of the upcoming 3.2.0 release
• IronJacamar 1.1.0.Alpha4, the 4th snapshot of the IronJacamar 1.1 series.

Plenty to choose from, regardless of your interests

Technical Posts from around JBoss

There have been numerous postings written this week but there are four, in particular, that are worth mentioning.

• Wesley has written a good post describing why he feels that it is sometimes necessary to go an extra step when converting existing web applications to run in a mobile environment
• Mircea has written a good post describing the new use1PcForAutoCommitTransactions capability introduced in Infinispan 5.1.CR1
• Brian has written another post in his CDK series, this time discussing how to wrap the JQuery UI Tabs plugin with the RichFaces CDK
• Jonathan would like to set the record straight on GWT, discussing what is and what isn't included in GWT.

Well that's it for another week and, indeed, another month.  Stay tuned for more updates from the Weekly Editorial.

Update: Fixed deadline for JUDCon India "Very Early Bird Fee"

Yet another week has gone by and the high-octane train that is JBoss and its community continues at a blistering pace.  As usual we try to bring you the best of the best, an update on the activities in and around JBoss and its community.

JBoss at JavaOne

JavaOne is next week and the "JBoss Everywhere" motto has never been more evident than seeing the phenomenal number of JBoss speakers in attendance.  We have 20 presentations over four days (seriously, check out the schedule) and have had our very own Dan Allen highlighted on the Featured Speakers carousel.

Of course that is not all that we are doing during Java One. We have three full days of presentations in our mini-theater at the JBoss booth (#5502) where we will be covering numerous topics such as JBoss Application Server 7, OpenShift, Infinispan and more.  Checkout the full list to see what is on and remember, these presentations are given by the folks who are behind the many projects at JBoss.  If you have any questions that need answers, want to give feedback about any of the JBoss projects and/or platforms, or just want to chat with the people who know the details then take a trip down to the booth.

As if the presentations were not enough, we are also giving you the chance to win the latest fashion craze heading out of Milan.  That's right, you could be the proud owner of a limited edition JBoss soccer jersey .  Just head along to the booth and enter the raffle for your chance to win.

JBoss parties at JavaOne

As you know JBoss loves to party and this year is no exception.  We will be hosting the “Lightning in the Cloud” JBoss party on Tuesday, October 4th, starting at 5:30pm PST. The party will be held at the historic “Slide” at 430 Mason St (between Derby St and Geary St), adjacent to Union Square where we will have food, drinks, music and a great crowd.

Remember to reserve your party invitation by registering now, then go by the JBoss booth, #5502, to pick up the invitation.

Transactions within TorqueBox

One of the most exciting developments this week has to be the announcement from the TorqueBox team about their support for XA transactions within Ruby, further enhancing the integration between Ruby and the JBoss Application Server.  The team has come up with an elegant integration, something that is not easy to do when transactions are involved.

If you want to find out how this affects your MessageProcessors, JMS messages, Background tasks or manipulation of your ActiveRecords then take a look at Jim's excellent post.

Forge, EE6 and OpenShift Express

Are you interested in deploying EE6 applications to the cloud?  Do you think it is hard to achieve?  Think again!

In this video Lincoln walks us through the creation of an EE6 application using Forge and how this can then be deployed to OpenShift Express.

Lincoln starts with the generation of a simple web application then, having shown how to deploy this to the cloud, he continues to demonstrate the flexibility of Forge by extending the application to

• generate a persistent entity representing a user
• generate web pages to manipulate the entities
• generate a REST endpoint to expose manipulation of the entities

All of this is achieved using Forge, deployed to the cloud, takes less than 10 mins, and doesn't have an editor in sight.  Very impressive.

The Future of Seam

Seam has been going through a number of changes of late and, as a consequence, rumors are starting to circulate about its future.  Shane has written a wonderful article discussing Seam and its future direction, its goal of uniting the CDI developer community and its aim of fostering innovation through the encouragement and incubation of new ideas and improvements.

If you are interested in Seam then it is a must-read.

Modular Serialization

Jason has taken some time to describe the inherent problems of using Java Serialization within a modular environment.  He describes a number of common problem cases and covers a number of possible solutions.  It is a very good article and one that should not be missed.

JBoss Portlet Bridge passes JSR-329 TCK

Wesley has recently announced that, after a lot of effort, JBoss Portlet Bridge has passed the JSR-329 TCK and has been approved by Oracle.  Congratulations to all involved in the process.

If you want to judge Wesley's excitement then take a look at the video he provides by way of a comparison

RichFaces and Mobile Web Frameworks

If you are interested in mobile development and RichFaces then you will definitely want to follow Wesley's series on RichFaces development for mobile applications.  He continues the series with his second article, covering  bookmarkable URLs and how to use the back button from within AJAX driven pages.

Developer Notes on the JBoss AS7 Console

The JBoss AS7 management console, as many of you may know, is implemented using GWT.  In this article Heiko discusses the implications of the detyped model used within the application server and the strongly typed model required by the GWT components, introducing some of the building blocks used to convert between the two representations.

Envers in JBossAS

Envers is a hibernate core module which enables the auditing of modification to your persistent entities with the addition of a simple annotation, now bundled within JBoss AS 7.0.2.  Adam has written a post describing how to integrate Envers into your application and includes a small JSF/CDI application by way of a demonstration.

SwitchYard and Forge

Keith has created a great video showcasing the integration between SwitchYard and Forge.  If you are interested in either of these projects then check out his post for the video link.

OpenBlend and SIOUG

OpenBlend is a one-day OpenSource conference held at the beautiful Ljubljana Castle in Slovenia.  Having had time to recover from the celebrations, Ales has now found some time to blog about the conference and his subsequent “CDI and Arquillian” workshop, with Marko, at SIOUG.

New Releases

Always keen to bring you new and exciting developments, here is a round up of the project releases that have happened in the last week

September 29th - Hibernate Core 4.0.0.CR4 is out, check out the release notes for details.

September 25th - Drools 5.3.0.CR1 is out, check the new and noteworthy changes.

As well as these candidate releases we also have

September 29th - Hibernate Search 4.0 beta 2 is released, removing the dependency on hibernate core.  Checkout Emmanuel's post and read the Migration Guide before updating.

Upcoming JBoss Events

The SoftShake IT conference will be happening in Geneva on October 3rd & 4th.  If you are attending then make sure to catch Galder's presentations on Data Grids.

JBoss In Bossa, the JBug:Brasil Conference, will be happening on October 8th.  Make sure to attend if you are in the region.

JUDCon 2011:London will be happening on October 31st and November 1st, leading up to the JAX London event.  If you are going to JAX, or will be in the area, then get yourself down to JUDCon. This is another great opportunity to learn from the source.

That's all for this week, please check back next week for more updates.  If you are attending Java One or SoftShake then have fun.