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Weekly Editorial

29 Posts authored by: marius.bogoevici

As summer has ended, and we have approach conference season, activity picks up and a flurry of news flows from the various JBoss projects.

 

Help designing Bean Validation 1.1

 

While working on the upcoming Bean Validation 1.1 specification Emmanuel Bernard asks for feedback on a new feature: method validation. Striking the balance between simplicity and flexibility is, as always, non trivial, so your opinion matters.

 

What's new in Drools

 

A series of blog posts focus on the new features of Drools 5.5, as well as advanced features and functionality. Mario Fusco writes about upcoming support for conditional named consequences in Drools 5.5. Mark Proctor has published an interview with Ronald G. Ross, "the father of business rules", and also writes about conditional branches with sub blocks and switch statements and enhancements in the Drools Spring module.

 

Modular Java before Jigsaw

 

David Bosschaert has published a blog entry describing how most of the goals of Java modularization can be attained with OSGi. As it provides a number of learning resources as well, it is a good starting point if you want to get familiar with the technology and how we use it at JBoss.

 

Advanced dependency resolution with latest ShrinkWrap

 

Andrew Rubinger has published a blog entry describing an important new feature of Shrinkwrap 2.0.0.Alpha2: Maven dependency resolution based on the Aether API. Apart from the elegant API,  the feature that looked most interesting to me was transitivity control - now you can include dependencies in your test, and the rest of the Web stays in its place, and not on your machine.

 

Team Errai at home and abroad

 

Team Errai is going on tour! Christian Sadilek has published the agenda of their upcoming presentations. If you're in Toronto, Montreal, at JavaOne or in Nice and you're interested in the future of the rich web, make sure you attend.

 

From Tomcat to JBoss

 

Are you a Tomcat user trying to run your application on JBoss? Read Francesco Marchioni's blog post to get you started.


Upcoming showings

Releases

What looks like a quiet summer is in fact the midpoint between an eventful end of June and the start of a busy September. So we may have fewer news this week, but they're as fresh and as interesting as you are used to.

 

Polyglot and cross-platform: C# client for Infinispan

 

Not only is Infinispan a premier Java caching and datagrid solution, but it's reach goes beyond the JavaEE platform with the Alpha release of it's C# client. Mircea Markus blogs about the release, the result of the work done by Sunimal Rathnayake - yet another successful Google Summer of Code project from JBoss.

 

The Benefits of OSS

 

Mark Proctor muses over the benefits of an open source ecosystem - compared to proprietary technologies. While the discussion is carried out in the specific context of Progress divesting itself of Savion, the general principles still apply: open-source technology backed by a strong community carries far less risk than proprietary lock-in - they aren't dependent of a specific company's business strategy.

 

More rules and processes

 

Mauricio Salatino continues his series of articles on rules/process integration with JBPM and Drools with two new entries here - focusing on older integration paterns and here - focusing on how to put the rule engine in Reactive Mode.

 

Meet JBoss Tools users

 

Max Andersen is sharing some data gathered from the opt-in ping-back feature available in JBoss Tools and JBoss Developer Studio, along with his personal conclusions.

 

Arquillian at JavaOne

 

The Arquillian team has published an overview of all the JavaOne talks where Ike will be present - if you are there and want to learn more about Arquillian in a specific context, there's your guide.

 

Master the Boss

 

Francesco Marchioni from mastertheboss.com has published two new interesting tutorials: one on using Netty, and the other one on JNDI configuration for various versions of JBoss AS.

 

How to JBoss

 

On howtojboss.com (a site that you should be familiar with already) Shane Johnson has published a couple of articles that show how to monitor and manage the performance and scalability of your JBoss EAP installations. The first article shows you how to tweak your user resource limits (ulimits) to fit scenarios that require a  large number of concurrent connections. The second article shows you how to use JMeter for identifying your maximum concurrency throughput. Both articles are very important, because they show you how to tweak the performance of your running applications, which is an important aspect when they reach production.

 

Releases

 

That's pretty much it for this week - enjoy your summer and join us next week for another roundup.

It's summertime (at least in the northern hemisphere), and while a lot of us are planning our vacations, inspiration does not have a calendar or schedule. So the JBoss team continues to balance work and break time, continuing to deliver great software (in fact we have seen a bountiful harvest of releases since last week) and rally around great ideas for our future roadmap. Here's what happened:

 

An Arquillian wave

 

The Arquilllians have launched another full-scale assault on bug lands, with a slew of releases covering the core and extensions.

 

  • First, Karel Piwko has announced the release of Arquillian Drone Extension 1.1.0.CR2 - mostly a bug fix release.
  • Bartosz Majsak followed close with Arquillian TestRunner Spock 1.0.0.Alpha2 - a component upgrade and bug fix release as well. If you haven't had a chance to try Spock, it's a good moment to give this  Java/Groovy test and specification framework a try now - 
  • Jakub Narloch continues his highly successful Google Summer of Code project with the release of the Arquillian Spring Extension 1.0.0.Alpha2. This is in fact a major overhaul of the previous release providing:
    • the Spring integration functionality has been reorganized so it does not target specific versions, but capabilities (xml, JavaConfig, environment). While capabilities can be traced to the releases in which they have been introduced, this provides a more intuitive way of deciding what needs to be included in the tests;
    • an embedded Spring container has been added, allowing faster testing of features that do not require container capabilities;
    • the Spring extension has been integrated with Arquillian Warp allowing the testing of Spring MVC artifacts like controllers while using Warp and Drone to specify client actions;
  • And last but not least, Aslak Knutsen has announced the release of Arquillian Core 1.0.2.Final, containing bug fixes and minor but important enhancements such as environment variable support.

 

Check all of them out - those bugs won't stand a chance.

 

Well-designed business processes with JBPM and Drools

 

A few updates for jBPM, covering enhancements to the visual design support and services:

 

The jBPM team has announced the release of jBPM designer 2.3.0.Final (read Tihomir Surdilovic's post for more details). And if you thought that business stuff can't be cool too, check voice-driven BPM.

Mauricio Salatino (aka Salaboy) provides some insights into the jBPM form builder.

 

Also, Microsoft Academic Search has been added to the jBPM community service thanks to the community contributor Omar Saif.

 

The biggest strengths of the tight jBPM/Drools integration in jBPM5 are highlighted by another post by Mauricio, who shows us a very useful set of patterns combining processes and rules.

 

Finally, Geoffrey de Smet demonstrates, with hard data, the benefits of the new Selector architecture in Drools Planner 5.5.0.Beta1, concerning memory consumption and general performance.

 

More secure with JBoss AS7 and JBoss EAP6

 

Although the Arquillian team will keep us safe from the bugs, there are many other threats that your application is facing. Luckily, you have many options for securing your JBoss applications. Shane Johnson shows us a pretty advanced option: enabling the special Intel AES-NI instructions that accelerate AES encryption and decryption on JBoss EAP6 running on RHEL6. Why is it important? For one thing, faster cryptographic operations means that you can use stronger options without paying a performance penalty - and read the rest of the article to learn what and how.

 

On the development side, Marek Posolda shows us how to integrate 3rd party identity and service providers with Picketlink: the example covers Google Apps and Salesforce. In the current environment where Platform-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service integration is often a requirement, this is a compelling showcase of Picketlink's capabilities, but also an informative practical guideline.

 

And it's worth mentioning here that Anil Saldhana, JBoss' lead security architect has been selected by OASIS as an OASIS Distinguished Contributor as a recognition of the commitment to contributing to the advancement of open source security standards,

 

Infinispan 5.2.0.Alpha2, now with more Map/Reduce

 

The Infinispan team has announced the release of Infinispan 5.2.0.Alpha, and Vladimir Blagojevic describes quite in detail the Map/Reduce enhancements that have been included in this release.

 


Change of helm for TorqueBox

 

With Bob McWhirther's move as Director of Polyglot for JBoss, the leadership of TorqueBox has passed on to Ben Browning. Congratulations, both Bob and Ben - and keep those releases coming. Oh, one just did:TorqueBox 2.1.0.Final is out.

 

Output buffering for servlet requests

 

JBoss' own Lincoln Baxter continues enhancing his Rewrite project - a trove of useful components for request-driven processing in web applications - regardless of the view technology being used (JSF, Spring MVC), etc.  The last addition as of release 1.1.0.Final is output buffering, which complements the response-enhancing facilities already in place.

 

Community JBoss Mastery

 

The excellent site mastertheboss.com continues it's great series of tutorials with an example of using TimeMachine scheduler on JBoss AS7 by Zemian Deng. A great example of the JBoss AS7 architecture allows seamless integration with other community projects.

 

In addition to that, Francesco Marchioni shares his thoughts comparing JBoss and Oracle middleware, based on earlier blog post by Oracle comparing the two. A good read, especially since it reflects the views of an independent community member.

 

Forge gets a new site

 

Also, the Forge project has a new, Awestruct-powered site. Check it out here.

 

Other releases

 

 

Sightings

 

  • JBUG Beijing has met on July 26, with a rich agenda, featuring Java EE and the Cloud, Hibernate OGM and HornetQ.

 

Thanks for reading our newsletter and see you next week for another roundup.

http://www.redhat.com/summit/img/logo-banner-small_new3.pngAfter last week's announcement of the JBoss Way - things are a bit quiet this week. We are gearing up for the annual celebration of all things Red Hat and JBoss: JUDCON + the Red Hat Summit and JBoss World, to be held between June 25-26 and June 26-29 in Boston. If you can make it to Boston, don't miss either!

 

Until then, you can learn more about the future of the platform from the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform Ease Into Cloud Virtual Event scheduled next week, on June 20 - a click away, we're virtually there.

 

 

Candidate release for JBoss Tools and Developer Studio

 

A critical part of the JBoss eco-system, JBoss Tools and Developer Studio has reached its first Candidate Release, and like each of its previous iterations, contains a number of significant improvements and critical new features - in areas like JBoss AS7 management, OpenShift, Maven and BrowserSim (an indispensible tool for mobile applications developers). Read everything about it as Max tells it all here.

 

Steal the blueprints - database reverse engineering with JBoss Forge

 

Francesco Marchioni continues his excellent series of tutorials with a couple of data-related examples, both extremely useful when migrating existing applications or using existing data with JBoss AS7. A first post shows you how to migrate datasource definitions from AS4/5/6 to AS7/EAP6. Next is a primer on database reverse engineering using JBoss Forge. This is another critical feature that shows how you can benefit from the rapid development capabilities of JBoss Forge in an existing project.

 

Are we doing the right thing at all?

 

Lincoln's tries to answer this question, in an awesome post, showing his excitement about the way in which different JBoss technologies try to put an end to technological fragmentation, and create easy-to-use, seamlessly integration technical solutions.

 

Buzzwords from Berlin

 

Mircea Markus and Sanne Grinovero share their impressions from Berlin Buzzwords 2012 - a lot of good stuff going on, especially if you take an interest in data management (storage, search, scale).

 

Meet the Drools and JBPM team at JBoss World

 

As announced by Mark Proctor, the Drools and JBPM team will have an all-day drop-in centre and codeathon on Friday June 29. So if you're around the conference and take an interest, drop in (you don't have to have summit tickets to take part).

 

Secrets of the RHQ

 

We often talk about development, but operations is an important part of enterprise application lifecycle. Here is where tools like RHQ become important. RHQ provides administration, monitoring, alerting, operational control and configuration in an enterprise setting with fine-grained security and an advanced extension model.

 

So the RHQ team has added a few interesting posts: Heiko Rupp blogs about the newly added support for JSONP in RHQ, and John Sanda talks about modeling metric data with Cassandra.

 

Sightings


  • Gavin King has presented Ceylon at the DC JBUG on June 13;
  • Dan Allen will talk about Forge and continuous deployment using Arquillian at the Uberconf.

 

Releases


While JBoss has always been and will ever be a household name in the world Java EE, it has never shied away from challenging and expanding its own zone of comfort, developing solutions for areas that fall outside the scope of traditional Java EE. It all makes sense, because these solutions share the same DNA: the collection of premier-class Java middleware components that make up the JBoss ecosystem. And we have a number of news this week which come to reinforce the idea that, while fostering the growth of enterprise Java in its traditional, Java EE, sense, JBoss is becoming more and more a trusted solution provider outside that space, by addressing other programming models and even languages, all done on top of the rock-solid foundation which is its Java and JVM-oriented middleware.

 

http://www.rubyinside.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/jruby1-150x150.pngRuby Red: JBoss welcomes JRuby

 

Probably the best illustration of where all this is heading is this week's main headline: the arrival of the JRuby core team - Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo at Red Hat. Initially announced at JRubyConf, this considerably expands the scope of the work already done by the TorqueBox team, as Ruby support on the JVM becomes a first-class project at JBoss. Not only the TorqueBox team will benefit from this, but so will Immutant and OpenJDK - and many other projects inside JBoss. In summary, the polyglot vision of JBoss is now closer to reality as laid out in Mark Little's welcome blog post.

 

Arquillians establish a beach head on the Spring planet ...

 

... but the first thing to know about arquillians is that they always come in peace. This is a two-fold success story. For one thing, JBoss Community's debut into GoogleSummer of Code as an independent organization has been auspicious: one of its projects has produced a release within 24 hours of the official coding start. The other side of the story is that, thanks to Jakub Narloch's excellent work, Arquillian has ventured outside it's traditional Java EE space. and with the first alpha release of the Arquilian Spring Extension, started providing support for in-container testing of Spring applications. This adds a capability that complements well the existing unit test support in Spring, and brings a new confidence in the behaviour of the application in its intended environment.

 

Making it big with Big Data (feat. Infinispan)

 

In the past week there have been a couple of excellent blog posts which addressed the practical aspects of usingInfinispan in various scenarios. Why are they sogood? Because they're use case driven - they solve actual problems. So if you're working on developing a solution that involves a data grid or a distributed cache, make sure that you check them first:

 

 

Secure your portals with GateIn and PicketLink

 

So, Diablo III has been released last week, but we're not going to talk about town portals. GateIn is the JBoss project that focuses on portal application development, an environment in which Single Sign On support is a critical feature. So Marek Posolda provides an excellent overview of GateIn's newly added SAML2 integration.

 

Ceylon's progress

 

Gavin King has blogged about the status of the upcoming M3 release - the upcoming new features (including JavaScript support), the state the IDE, OpenShift integration.

 

Advanced Tooling for SOA

 

Tooling, especially in what concerns visualization and visual design, is a critical part of developing service-oriented architectures. Keith Babo describes the new features of the upcoming SwitchYard Eclipse tooling accompanied by a cool video!

 

Gary Brown describes in detail the new features of Savara 2.1 Eclipse tooling, especially in what concerns BPMN2 and Switchyard support.

 

Have released this week

 

  • Aerogear has released version 1.0.0.M4. You can read the entire list of new features, but in the spirit of today's main theme we'd like to highlight the Ruby/TorqueBox demo;
  • Seam 2.3.0.Beta2 is out as well, continuing its race towards a final release.
  • JBPM 5.3 has been released as well.
  • JBoss Tools and Developer Studio Beta 3 are out, with a whole slew of new features and improvements in the area of OpenShift, Maven, BrowerSim, GWT, Annotation Processing and also installable sources - very useful for debugging.

 

Sightings

 

 


 

 

 

 

 


Welcome back. We're still here, still busy as ever. But we're glad you came to read our weekly roundup of news. We're as excited as you are, becausewe get to count our treasures, a weekful of new events and achievements. So let us take a break and walk with you.

 

 

http://design.jboss.org/arquillian/logo/ui/images/success/arquillian_ui_success_256px.png

Arquillian, finally

 

To me (and not just me), Arquillian is one of the most interesting projects in the JBoss portfolio. Not only due to its technical merits, which abound, but also because it makes it easy to argue that JBoss 'gets it right' when it comes to high quality open source software. It's a real solution to a real challenge: integration testing for Java applications. A new idea for solving an old problem. That has moved from a proof of concept to an entire ecosystem incredibly fast. Because it's community-driven. And easy to learn. So it's cool.

 

It's first stable release 1.0.0.Final has just come out and it's truly a reason to celebrate. Currently, Arquillian supports running your true tests (that is, exercising your actual application code) in most major application servers or servlet containers (think JBoss, Glassfish, Tomcat, Weblogic, Websphere and so on), and embedded containers as well (although you may want to be careful with that - read Dan's post for details).

 

And as Arquillian goes, so go it's siblings: a number of other extensions have had their releases this week as well. Because not only business code matters - testing the UI, browser automation  are equally important. So now you can do your applications the right way and keep them bug-free - a complete ecosystem is available for testing them from end to end - from the application server to the browser and tothe mobile platform. Here's a quick roundup of the projects from the Arquillian family that have had their final releases in the past week:

 

Arquillian Persistence Extensions has released 1.0.0.Alpha4 too. A complete list of modules and most up-to-date information about their state can be found here.

 

A grid that can hold all your data

 

The other big news of the week is the first beta release of the JBoss Data Grid, which is the JBoss product built around Infinispan - our high performance data rid community project. For mission critical projects, this means an opportunity of breaking free from the shackles of relational databases and having a fully supported, high performance data store at their fingertips. The significance of this event sis best explained by Rich Sharples and Manik Surtani.

 

At the movies. Starring: JBoss Developer Studio

 

How do you get started with JBoss Developer Studio? Follow Max Andersen's blog, and learn more about it, as well as the future plans for m2e-wtp, a critical component of the Maven integration in Eclipse. Burr Sutter has created a series of screencasts, which introduce the major features of the IDE.

 

Ceylon Herd

 

Stephane Epardaud provides a detailed description of the newly added module system and repository of Ceylon: Ceylon Herd. You will learn the rationale behind the decision to create it from scratch, as well as its main design goals.

 

Web services

 

Writing applications that rely on web-services is often getting to the challenge where, in order to see that your code is working correctly it needs some reference endpoints which can be invoked to test interoperability. Alessio Soldano's blog provides a demo on a number of such webservice endpoints deployed in OpenShift, which demonstrate the capabilities of JBoss AS 7.1, especially in the WS-Security area. So, anyone can get access the demo and try them out. And see that everything just works.

 

Transactionality in massively parallel systems

 

Mark Little's has published a higher level perspective on transactions and their role in the modern, highly concurrent architectures. As with many other aspects of designing and implementing software systems, the commoditization of multi-core systems has changed the way in which we need to look at transactions - the single-threaded, database-driven perspective is not enough anymore. 

 

Releases

 

Outside Arquillan and its extensions, a few other JBoss projects have released new versions in the past week:

 

Sightings

  • If you are in Billund, Denmark next week, check the JBoss sessions at MOW 2012 (18th-20th April)
  • The DC JBUG has a meetup on April 18, with CloudBees as a guest, showcasing deploying Java EE Web profile applications to various containers including Jboss AS 7
  • Sanne Grinovero and Mircea Markus will talk at the Portugal JUG on April 18 about Infinispan and Hibernate OGM

 

Thanks for joining us again and come back next week for another roundup!

 

 

 


http://design.jboss.org/jbossAS/logo/final/jbossas7_ligature_64px.pnghttps://community.jboss.org/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/17975/Java_Compatible_Entpr_Edition_clr_hori.gif

It's just mid-February and a great number of achievements is already behind us this year. More to come. The first big item of news this week is the release of the final version of JBoss AS 7.1.

 

Thunder follows lightning (closely, as always)

 

You've seen the lightning, now hear the thunder. It may be just a minor version change, but by no means this is a minor event: JBoss AS 7.1.0.Final "Thunder" is out, one of the largest releases in JBoss history. The new release brings in a whole slew of features and stability fixes, the most significant being a certified full Java EE 6 profile, which adds support for a number of new specifications on top of the already certified Java EE 6 Web Profile available as of the release of JBoss AS 7.0.0.Final "Lightning". No less than 1465 issues have been fixed since JBoss AS 7.0.2.Final, and they account for the new features added as well as improvements in areas such as security, management and clustering.

 

What do you need to know:

  • The fully certified Java EE6 profile brings support for a number of specifications - including EJB 3.1 asynchronous and remote invocation, timers and message-driven beans,
  • The security model is more strict, with remote access points (except web applications) being secured by default;
  • Management capabilities have been enhanced - through an improved management API, CLI and administration console - on the latter, more details are outlined here by Heiko Braun;
  • Remote connectivity capabilities have been enhanched - not only for EJB access but also in the area of distributed transactions;
  • Clustering support includes web and EJB replication, and  experimental CDI replication as well.

 

You can learn all the details in the release notes, while downloading the new release!

 

JBoss EAP 5.1 Common Criteria certified

 

We usually write about the bleeding edge of Java EE technology and community projects. It is, sometimes, interesting to learn about latest developments regarding JBoss commercial products, like the news shared by Anil Saldhana - that JBoss EAP 5.1.0 and JBoss EAP 5.1.1 have just received their Common Criteria certification at EAL4+ level. What does this mean? In short, it has been audited and found to fulfill the highest requirements for security-sensitive environments (like government customers).

 

J is for Java


Following last week's post, Mark Little provides a more detailed perspective on his vision about the future of Java as a suitable platform in the age of polyglot software development: Java continues to be the foundation and powerhouse of the JBoss enterprise platform, while developers will be able to use their language of choice, owing to approaches such as TorqueBox or Immutant.

 

The Trailblazer SIG is born!

 

Help creating better JBoss developer resources such as examples, tutorials or screencasts by participating in the newly created Trailblazer SIG!  We already have a number of initiatives in place, and that's just the start - with your participation it could be much, much more! Stay at the forefront of Java EE innovation, join us now!

 

Infinispan: how would you like your cross-data center replication?

 

If you are interested in of cross-datacenter replication - Mircea Markus is asking on the behalf of the Infinispan team for suggestions and feedback on the design of this functionality, eyeing for its implementation in 5.2.0.

 

New releases

 

With its 4.1.0 version, which has been released last week, Hibernate Core gets a name which will, hopefully improve the clarity of its purpose: Hibernate ORM. In the announcement blog post, Steve Ebersole is explaining why, as well as what you can find in the new release.

 

Hibernate ORM is not the only member of the family that gets a new release - while announcing Hibernate Search 4.1.0.Beta2, Sanne Grinovero discusses an important new feature: the ability of specifying the indexing path for embedded entities, thus allowing better control over what exactly gets indexed in a complex structure. Worth trying! To me, however, the lesson about the importance of community feedback in framework design is equally interesting - another reason to read Sanne's post.

 

Errai continues its race towards building a better rich web experience for Java developers with the completion of its 2.0.Beta1 version. Jonathan Fuerth is providing a comprehensive overview of the release as well as the upcoming roadmap.

 

If you are looking for deeper integration between Spring and JBoss, Snowdrop 2.0.2.Final is out, with a number of fixes related to Spring 3.1 support.

 

Teiid 8.0.0 alpha 2 has been released as well.

 

Sightings


If you happen to be in Brno, make sure that you are not missing the Fedora Conference this weekend (17-18 February) - a lot of JBoss tracks - see the schedule here.

 

A JBPM 5 webinar is scheduled next week on 22 February.

 

This is all for this week, join us again in a week's time for latest and freshest in the ever-evolving world of JBoss.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Wrapping up the week, wrapping up the month. It's time to look back at all major events that took place over the past seven days, and I am reminded, as always, of what a tremendous experience it is to live in the open source world. And, with JBoss it's easiest to tap into that - JBoss is everywhere, both technologically and geographically.

 

http://p.twimg.com/Aj7BtjoCIAI3Lno.jpg

The first big story of the week is undoubtably, JUDCon India which took place earlier this week (Jan 24-25). With a strong participation (800 attendees) our first JUDCon in the Asia-Pacific zone has been a real success. Our colleagues Jaikiran Pai, Manik Surtani and Galder Zamarreno have published their impressions. The feedback of the attendees themselves is excellent as well: here are the stories published by Aravind Ajad and Nibin Varghese.

 

We're happy to read stuff like that that! Join us again, and remember, JBoss World and JUDCon Boston (June 2012) are getting closer and closer.

 

Meanwhile, you have a chance to meet us at FOSDEM 2012 (Feb 4-5, Brussels, Belgium) - here's the schedule of JBoss-themed talks. Max Andersen has also put together a summary of JBossians' participation at other two conferences: EclipseCon (March 26-29, Reston, Virginia) and MOW 12 (April 18-20, Billund, Denmark).

 

 

 

 

 

 

A couple of news regarding Hibernate: Steve Ebersole has been blogging about upcoming natural key support in 4.1. Incorporating natural keys (aka business keys) in your ORM design is a recommended practice, and this is important news, because so far this needed to be handled manually, using criteria or other mechanisms. Right now, it's all declarative and supported by the API. The other bit of news from the same area is provided by Hardy Ferentschik, in regards to the latest improvements to be found in Hibernate Metamodel Generator 1.2.0.CR1.

 

Mark Proctor has published a blog entry and an update on his implementation of Wumpus World, an artificial intelligence example in the form of an exploring game, illustrating the power of Drools outside the traditional business/financial setting. Now you don't have an excuse for not playing by the rules.

 

Very often the difference between being productive and struggling is provided by the tools that we use. JBoss Tools (and the integrated JBoss Developer Studio) have been fostering productivity for a long time, and they're living proof that a good IDE is much more than a fancy text editor with a compiler attached. Being able to have news, technologies, examples and quickstarts at your fingertips is one of the well-kept secrets of star developers. Len Di Maggio provides an overview of JBoss Central, a newly added feature which can be found in both JBoss Tools and JBoss Developer Studio, which provides access to all of these goodies - with a simple click.

 

For those of you who have followed closely the progress of Infinispan 5.1, the good news is that the final version (5.1.0.Final) is out - see the announcement here - pick it up and have lots of fun!

 

TorqueBox gets another beta, which brings it to v2.0.0.Beta3 - you can read more about the new features here.

 

Sightings

 

While they are not at a conference, JBossians still love spreading the word about the good stuff (that we build):

  • Peter Larsen will speak at the DC JBUG about Teiid and JBoss Enterprise Data Services on February 8t
  • Ben Browning will speak at the Atlanta JBUG about TorqueBox on January 31st
  • Eric Schabell will speak at the Portugal JUG on February 16 about OpenShift and JBPM
  • Andrew Rubinger will speak at the Utah JUG on February 16 as well about Arquillian

 

That's all for this week - gather around next week for more updates!

25count.pngLet's face it: we're engineers and we love numbers. This week, we have a particular fondness for 25, which is the number of issues that we've published so far. Yup, it's an important milestone, and we'd like to take a moment to thank you for your continued interest, hoping that you enjoyed reading our editorial as much as we enjoyed writing it.

 

And, after this brief ceremonial moment, let's get back to our main focus: delivering the freshest technical stories about the platform we love best.

 

JBoss Asylum - Forge Edition

 

Episode 23 of the JBoss Asylum has been released - featuring JBoss Forge, our own state-of-the art RAD tool. By listening to the podcast, you can learn more about it from Lincoln Baxter III, project lead, and Paul Bakker, JBoss Community member and tireless Forge contributor.

 

Impressions from Devoxx (and not just)

 

A couple of our JBoss colleagues have taken the time to write a bit about Devoxx and other events that they have spoken to on behalf of JBoss.

 

  • Andrew's european grand tour: In his blog, Andrew Rubinger recounts his impressions from a month-long series of conferences in Europe. In the first part he is musing about about the fast pace of JBoss AS7 and Arquillian, recollects interesting discussions with JBoss team and community members, and a surprise encounter with Team Spring. That should be spoiler enough.
  • Infinispan team at Devoxx: Sanne Grinovero writes about the Infinispan team participation at Devoxx, as well as the newest developments in Hibernate Search and Hibernate OGM. I'm personally enticed by the new integration layer offered by Hibernate OGM and its opportunities. If I'd be in Newcastle next week, I'd attend Sanne and Paul Robinson's JBUG talk on the 13th of December. But some of you may be there, so don't miss it!

 

More about Seam

 

Following last week's announcement on the future of Seam and the formation of the Apache DeltaSpike project, the Seam team has worked relentlessly on finalizing Seam 3.1, and the first release candidate is out. You can read more in Shane Bryzak's announcement. Jason Porter delivers some tips concerning the latest fixes.

 

In what concerns Seam 2 users, Marek Novotny has provided more details on the roadmap of Seam 2.3, which will allow Seam 2 users to fully enjoy the benefits of JSF2 and JBoss AS7.

 

JUDCon India agenda published

 

The agenda for JUDCon India (Bangalore, 24-25 January 2012) has been finalized, and can be found here - two days packed of presentations on state-of-the art technology.


Be at the JBoss World, and let your voice be heard!


We'd like to remind you that the Call For Papers for JBoss World 2012 is still open, and the deadline is next week (December 16). So, if you have something interesting to say, choose one of the tracks, and submit a talk!

 

Packt would like to know what you want to read about

 

Packt Publishing has an online survey, where they essentially want to make sure they are making the right offers to all JBoss users and are providing what they need and want.  Check some details that  Len DiMaggio provides here. Maybe it's time to show an interest in that particular book that you've been waiting for.

 

New releases

 

We also had a slew of new releases coming out:

 

This is all for this week. We wish you good luck with holiday preparations - which for many of us may begin with releasing all that stuff before that deadline in December. Come back next week for more news.

This was a quieter week, but interesting things still keep happening in the world of JBoss. Here are few:

 

A  shout from the JBoss Asylum inmates

 

Our favourite podcast, the JBoss Asylum, has recorded another edition, focusing on Java One. This edition's guest is Andrew Rubinger, tackling topics such as JBoss AS7, Arquillian as well as other recent developments from the enterprise Java world.

 

JBPM editor: On the web first, then in the cloud

 

We have announced last week the enhancements to the web-based JBPM editor. This week, Eric Schabell will show you how you can try it by yourself, by using the cloud-based version deployed in OpenShift. Indeed, all the nice web applications want to go there.

 

Pluggable encoding with TorqueBox

 

Torquebox provides now pluggable message encoding. What does this mean?  It means that Ruby applications that are deployed in TorqueBox may talk in a portable fashion to other applications via messages, regardless of what language are they written in. Learn how TorqueBox is  adding superior interoperability to the extensive list of advantages that the Java EE-based Ruby runtime provides from Toby Crawley's post.

 

Learn Switchyard with the workshop materials

 

The Switchyard team went on an Asian tour last month, giving a series of workshops. Keith Babo has published the workshop materials, so you can now learn more about using the new lightweight and powerful ESB from JBoss.

 

Content negociation in RHQ's RESTful API

 

Heiko Rupp has provided an overview of the latest enhancements of RHQ's RESTful API in the area of content negociation, providing an interesting example of avoiding code duplication when explicitly handling concerns that apply across content types, such as response codes and caching.

 

Unveiling MVEL

 

MVEL, a scripting language for the JVM, has been an integral part of Drools for a long time. In this article, published on The Server Side, Mike Proctor and Mike Brock provide an overview the main features of the language, arguing why it is, as they say, "JBoss' secret weapon".

 

New releases:

 

 

Upcoming Events

 

 

Have a fun coding time, and join us next week for another round of news!

 

 


It's conference season, so there should be no surprise that some of the most important stories this week relate to the JBoss presence at various events. But not only that - we also have new releases, technical articles and many other  news from near and far.

 

We came, you saw, everyone won: Java One

 

As anticipated, the JBoss presence at Java One was massive and well-received, and our team on the ground has been kept busy by the packed audience at the sessions and at the booths (see the pictures).  Mark Little has been the first to publish his impressions - and there are more blogs to come.

 

http://community.jboss.org/servlet/JiveServlet/downloadImage/38-4216-17145/450-336/IMG_0076.jpghttp://community.jboss.org/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-4216-17146/IMG_0083.jpg

 

Duke makes the right choice. Twice.

 

Besides the opportunity of talking about our latest technologies, there was another reason for the JBoss crowd  to enjoy their participation at Java One. We're talking about Duke's Choice Awards where two JBoss projects are winners this year:

 

  • Arquillian for Innovative Integration Testing
  • Netty for Innovative Network Programming

 

Fun fact about Netty: whenever you tweet about our weekly update, you are one of its users. Netty, a NIO-based asynchronous event-driven network application framework is a central component in Twitter's architecture.

 

Break your applications to make them better: Byteman

 

Andrew Dinn has published the 'Getting Started with Byteman' guide to DZone. Byteman is a Java bytecode instrumentation tool that allows the injection of code into applications (including running ones), using a simple yet powerful scripting language. This makes tracing and monitoring particularly easy, but it is fault injection - testing that your application is robust enough to handle unexpected failures - where Byteman proves to be uniquely useful.


Advanced Wizardry with SwitchYard and the Eclipse plugin

 

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". Or, at least, so goes Arthur C. Clarke's quote. Be that as it may, a wizard's powers can be put to good use in either case. So, technology it is. Following Keith Babo's introduction of the SwitchYard plugin last week, Rob Cernich follows by describing its features in more detail, including the new wizards, XSD handling and m2e (Maven integration) configurations. SwitchYard is a premier lightweight enterprise integration framework, and tooling support (both through Eclipse and Forge) is another great addition to a great set of features.

 

BPM and rules management

 

In addition to the sessions at the upcoming RuleFest in San Francisco (October 24 - October 28), JBoss and Red Hat will organize a two-day Drools/JBPM BootCamp on October 27-28 (with a specific focus on healthcare on the second day).  For more details, read Mark Proctor's detailed announcement here.

 

On a related topic, Kris Verlaenen has published an overview of the service repository introduced by JBPM 5, which allows developers to create and share  services. This should make integration with well-known providers much easier. JBoss thrives first and foremost on the participation of its community, so you are encouraged to contribute to the repository with your own implementation.

 

JBoss AS7: as seen by the community


Adam Bien, Java Champion and Java EE expert has blogged about his experience of using JBoss AS 7.0.2 for more than a simple smoke test.

 

Hanneli Tavante, Seam community member has written about JBoss AS7 (in Portuguese).

 

New releases

 

  • Hibernate Search 4 has published its first release candidate, which means that a final release is forthcoming
  • Tattletale 1.2.0.Beta1 is out - it's even easier to check what the dependecies of a project are, since it supports WARs and EARs too now

 

JBoss sightings

 

Besides Java One, there were a couple of other events where JBoss was present:


Upcoming events

 

Was this a busy week? We cannot possibly know. A JBossian's work is never done, so we will keep working to deliver state-of-the art technology in collaboration with our enthusiastic community. Read us next week, for more news.


Being relentlessly busy over summer means that there's a lot to show for it when fall comes. Well, summer has come and gone, and there is a lot of stuff that our team would like to share with you. Download the latest releases of JBoss projects, and follow the talks delivered by JBoss team members. It's easy to find them: JBoss is everywhere.

 

At Java One: JBoss takes over

 

javaone2011_spotlight.png

JBoss sits at the forefront of enterprise Java innovation, and if you're at Java One this year, you will find a massive JBoss presence. Or, as Mark Little's post said: "maybe they should rename it as JBossOne!". Make sure that you attend the talks delivered by JBoss team members during sessions and at the JBoss booth.

 

And, for anything in the world, don't miss the "Lightning in the Cloud" party. JBossians are not just technically savvy, but also a fun bunch.

 

 

Over the web: all eyes on HTML5


One of the key aspects of today's software industry is an expanding eco-system of increasingly powerful mobile devices. HTML5 adds a number of features that developers can use for building rich, powerful web-based applications. Burr Sutter's webinar of this week synthethised these capabilities, from a unique enterprise Java-focused perspective. If you are an enterprise Java developer and you want to be up-to-date with the current developments of the industry, make sure that you watch the recoding of the webinar "HTML5 for the Java Web Developer". You'll learn a lot, I know I did.

 

In addition to that, Wesley Hales will hold a presentation on "The Mobile Web - HTML5 and mobile devices" at the Atlanta HTML5 user group on September 22nd. If you're in the area, make sure you attend.

 

Richfaces: component-oriented and mobile

 

Brian Leathem has continued his overview of the Richfaces CDK with an Input component - paving the way for a a more complex discussion on wrapping existing JavaScript components, such a jQuery UI component. Stay tuned.

 

Also, Wesley Hales has started a series of blog posts addressing on using Richfaces with mobile applications. Follow it for interesting technical details and tips.

 

On the (data) grid: a new Infinispan release, and how to take advantage of CDI and Ruby

 

Infinispan continues to move forward by releasing 5.1.0.Alpha2 this week, containing features that address particular areas such as push state transfer. Read more about it in the release announcement.

 

Integrating Infinispan with the rest of your application is much easier if it can be done through a generic, universally-understood programming model. Well, in Java EE there is a common idiom, and everyone speaks it - CDI, so it is only natural for Infinispan to support it. Kevin Pollet's blog entry describes the Infinispan-CDI integration module in detail, providing detailed examples on its usage, as well as about other features such as support for JCache annotations.

 

Another interesting example of using Infinispan comes from Lance Ball who shared the code and slides from his StrangeLoop presentation - using the DataMapper Ruby ORM over Infinispan with TorqueBox. More than just being a cool showcase, it illustrates perfectly the strength of the TorqueBox model. Ruby developers can take advantage of their favourite language and frameworks, on top of powerful Java EE middleware. Bring your apps to us, we'll treat them right!

 

A new JBoss AS7 release

 

A steady stream of releases ensures that new features and bug fixes are promptly delivered to users, and that is especially true for JBoss AS7. JBoss AS 7.0.2.Final "Arc" includes new features such as support for JSF 2.1, asynchronous EJBs, SSO and many other resolved issues. Get the best out of our favourite platform, keep your application server up-to-date!

 

Arquillian, not just for servers

 

If you are familiar with Arquillian, you should know by now how to use it for testing server-side code. But Karel Piwko will show you another way of using Arquillian - through its Arquillian Drone extension you can test the web UI as well, thus making sure that you also provide functional tests for your application.

 

Upcoming: spatial queries in Hibernate Search

 

Nicholas Helleringer, one of our JBoss community members, has created a spatial query integration module for Hibernate Search and has blogged about it here!

 

JBoss sightings

 

Besides the already mentioned topics, last week we had:

 

  • A lot of interesting topics and a list of participants including several JBoss team and community members at OpenBlend in Ljubljana.
  • A demo-packed JBoss BOF at the Toronto JUG with the participation of several JBoss teams.
  • The September issue of JAXenter's Java Tech Journal is completely dedicated to JBoss AS7 and OpenShift: make sure you grab it, it's free.

 

And don't forget about:

 

 

Is that all? Obviously not. In the JBoss community there is always something going on. Come back next week to find out more.

news.jpegIn the past week, the JBoss Community has been as relentless as ever - we had new releases, blogs, talks and webinars. So, here are the main headlines.

 

Even better data integration: Teiid 7.5 released

 

Data is an asset of critical importance in business computing, and can be stored in various formats and physical representations. Modern business applications reuse and integrate existing data, and using a diverse set of physical sources can be a particularly daunting task. But you can make it much simpler by using Teiid, an open-source data virtualization system that uses abstraction and federation for integrating and querying multiple such sources of data in real-time, without the need for a data migration process. If you work on an enterprise integration project, make sure you check it out. Version 7.5 has been released this week, and it adds a whole bunch of new features and stability fixes.

 

Hidden gems of JBoss AS 7.0.1

 

We mentioned the release of JBossAS 7.0.1 "Zap" in our previous editorial. Since then, JBoss AS team members have blogged about some very cool features that are included in the release, which show why JBossAS 7 is not only powerful but also extremely flexible and developer-friendly.

 

  • JPA providers à la carte (and you may not even need a database): JBoss AS 7 has great JPA support through Hibernate 4 and JBoss AS 7.0.1 adds the option of choosing another provider when deploying an application allowing developers to finely tune the server to their needs and smoothen the migration process. Scott Marlow explains this in detail, showing how to use a different provider, such as Hibernate 3.5+. And if you wish to use a datagrid like Infinispan to conquer the limitations of relational databases, yet still use a classic JavaEE application model, look no further - Scott's post will also show you how to use Hibernate OGM as a JPA provider as well.
  • Deploying a datasource with the JBoss Maven plugin: If you are a Maven user, you need to check the JBoss AS7 plugin - it provides support for deploying/redeploying and undeploying your applications, increasing the degree of automation of your build process. But not just that - it can also help setting up the server by creating datasources, as shown in this post by Stuart Douglas. When the infrastructure is also created by the build process, the setup is even easier.

 

Meanwhile, in the cloud ...

 

JBossAS7 has been available in OpenShift for two weeks, and demos and blogs continue to explore its various features. Jaikiran Pai has written an extensive and detailed blog entry about deploying Java EE 6 applications in OpenShift Express with JBoss AS7. A must read and a welcome complement to our series of videos. While Express has taken the main stage in the past few weeks, it is worth noting that OpenShift also provides the more powerful Flex option, which allows you to run applications on your own cloud servers. If you want to learn how to use OpenShift Flex for running Java EE 6 applications, check Pete Muir's latest recorded webcast.

 

See Arquillian at work


Do you write good code? Show it! No feature is truly complete without the tests that prove that it is truly so. You think it is too hard? The Arquillian project aims to make it easy, whether you want to run tests locally or in a remote container. In fact, because JBoss AS7 is so amazingly fast, testing in a container (embedded or remote) has never been easier - and you can be confident that your production code will be ok, since you ran the tests in the actual environment (or one which functionally similar to it). If you want to learn more about it, you can watch Andrew Rubinger's webinar from last week.

 

Errai 1.3: almost done

 

If you are a GWT developer, you need to check Errai, a GWT-based rich web application framework which provides a simple and efficient programming model which includes CDI support and an asynchronous communication model between the server and the client (browser), including support for pushing messages - and many other features. The team has announced the first candidate release for Errai 1.3 this week, which is the start of the final stretch before its completion. Also, if you happen to be in Ottawa, you can listen Mike Brock talk about it at the SummerCamp in Ottawa on the 27th of August.

 

STOMP-over-WebSockets in TorqueBox

 

The TorqueBox project has recently added support for STOMP-over-WebSockets, offering a browser-push based solution for Ruby applications. Bob McWhirter has published a series of posts about it, including a demo chat application. Make sure that you check it out. And if you're at the Ruby Hoedown in Nashville, TN - make sure that you go and see Lance Ball talk about TorqueBox.

 

From JUGs and JBUGs

 

Amongst the events of interest in the following weeks:

 

This is all ...


This was all for this week, enjoy the last weeks of summer - and come back next week for more news. 

A lot of interesting things happened since last week. Let us do a quick roundup:

 

  • We knew that HornetQ was fast, but now it's faster than ever: the HornetQ team has published a blog entry about the record performance of HornetQ: a whopping 8 million messages per second, against the industry-standard SpecJMS2007 benchmark. The best news? While the tests have been executed against JBoss EAP 5.1.2, HornetQ is powering JBoss AS7 as well - so look forward to the same great performance there.
  • If you plan to migrate an existing Seam 2 project to AS7,  you should check Marek Novotny's blog post. You can see how older applications can also benefit of the goodness of AS7, with minimal changes.
  • For Richfaces users: Lukas Fryc has posted an excellent overview of two examples of using Richfaces with JBoss AS7. And actually more: if you read it closely, you will also learn how to create JMS queues using the CLI and also through your application's code.
  • JBoss AS7 also a great runtime for OSGi bundles, which was the main focus of an excellent webinar by Thomas Diesler and David Bosschaert. If you are interested, in it, but missed it - you can always watch the recording of the demo.
  • The JBoss Asylum has a new podcast. This time, the guests are Mark Proctor and Michael Anstis. The main topic is Drools with its new 5.2 release, but the recent developments in the Java EE world got their share of attention too.
  • It's busy times for TorqueBox - and members of the team and community spread the word about it in a variety of places. And if you want to hear about it yourself, you can listen to Bob McWhirther's interview, explaining how Torquebox allows you to love Ruby on Rails and get the performance of Java EE.
  • Gavin King continues to expand his preview on Ceylon with new articles, about the current progress, and the reasoning behind some design decisions such as the ellimination of the do-while loop as well as the handling of sequences and sequenced parameters.
  • A few new releases have come out this week:
    • Manik Surtani announces Infinispan 5.0.CR8 - and now, for the final release
    • Gail Badner and Steve Eversole announce two new versions of Hibernate. Hibernate 3 has gotten a new maintenance release in 3.6.6.Final, while Hibernate 4 moves one step further towards a final release, with 4.0.0.Beta4.
  • Participating in you local JBUG is a great way to keep track of the latest developments and get in touch with the comunity and JBoss developers.  So, what happened close to you? Last week:
    • The Sydney JBUG has received an introduction on AS7 by Stuart Douglas
    • The Japan JBUG has announced an upcoming talk on AS7 next week
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