Yes it's that time of year again when some of us celebrate the festive season in a range of manners including parties, taking it easy, various pet projects and writing blog entries! Well this year rather than try to summarise the entire 2019 editorial or even give an update since the last one (you can find it all here anyway), I want to take a different approach. Of course I want to say a big thank you to everyone in our diverse communities; whether you're contributing ideas, feedback, code or bug reports, you are a massive help to us and everyone else in the community and you all deserve a big round of applause. However, whilst this is a good time of year to reflect on what we've all done and plan for the future, it's also an even better time to take a break and spend time with friends and family. Step away from the keyboard for a few days. Stop tracking social media and email. Unwind. Recharge your batteries and do something fun (yes, I know that for many of us, myself included, coding falls into that category so maybe I'll let you off with that!) There'll be plenty of time to reflect on 2019 and look forward to 2020 in the days ahead but for now take a break - your friends, family, pets and even you will benefit from it! All the best and I look forward to talking to you all next year and maybe meeting a few of you too

So in this week's entry we have a mixed bag of things to cover with no single focus area - the teams have been working across a number of areas.

OK so let's kick it off with a long entry from Michael Musgrove on the Narayana team about how to evaluate STM implementations. As Mike says at the start of the article:

"Software Transactional Memory (STM) is a way of providing transactional behaviour for threads operating on shared memory. The transaction is an atomic and isolated set of changes to memory such that prior to commit no other thread sees the memory updates and after commit the changes appear to take effect instantaneously so other threads never see partial updates but on abort all of the updates are discarded."

This is the first article in a series so if you're interested in transactions (and let's face it, who isn't?!) keep watching the Narayana blog.

There are a few entries on Hibernate to report on this week. The first from Guillaume talks about how to use Hibernate ORM with JDK 11. Then Yoann announced the release of Hibernate Search 5.6, 5.9 and 5.10. And of course no editorial would be complete without referencing the regular Hibernate Community Newsletter!

Meanwhile Mr Camel himself, Claus Ibsen, has been to JavaZone and has written a report, a photo from which is below!

Finally for this week Cheng has written an article on building and deploying containerized Java Batch Applications on OpenShift!

OK that's it for now! See you next time.

There has been a lot of BPM related activity this relatively quiet week.

jBPM Lead Kris Verlaenen has written an article about his attendance of bpmNEXT 2018. In fact it was such a good day 1 that he had to span it across two articles! Kris also followed up with a couple of entries on day 2 activities. Meanwhile Edson Tirelli has written a complimentary piece that points out videos to the various sessions so everyone can enjoy.

Also this week Eric has been talking about how easy it is to install OpenShift Container Platform 3.9 as well as part 3 of his series on the Open Innovation Labs residencies.

Christian writes about the book he and Burr Sutter have written about Istio Service Mesh and which has just been released. Congrats guys!

Finally Hibernate OGM 5.4.0 Alpha 1 is out and the Keycloak team are conducting a questionnaire for users so please look at it.

OK that's it for this week!

It's been a rather quiet week, probably due to a lot of our team getting ready for US Thanksgiving. But there has been some activity and in the spirit of getting something out (release early, release often) ...

The Infinispan and Vert.x teams are in Madrid this week for Codemotion (I hope they're getting better weather than some of us!) If you are in the area then this is a great opportunity to go and see a couple of our teams and give them feedback, learn the roadmaps etc. And even though some of the team are in Spain, they managed to put out an update to the Infinispan/Spark connector, which Gustavo discusses. Plus an update to the C++ and C# Hotrod clients!

As usual, there's the Hibernate Community Newsletter to browse while you're working or digesting turkey! And we've even had a Teiid release, version 9.3.5 this time. Congratulations to the team!!

While I've got your attention I'll take the opportunity to remind you all about EE4J. I've spoken about this before on my blog, but there's been a lot of activity in the last few days as we've started to ask for input on the new Java EE brand name (EE4J is the project, not the brand), as well as moving some specifications and reference implementations across to the project, as you can see from the twitter feed:

Please take a look and get involved.

OK that's it for this week!

This week we've a mixed bunch of entries to highlight. Let's start with a mainstay of this editorial, jBPM and Drools. Edson has been writing about how they and OptaPlanner are switching to agile delivery! Hot on the heels of that Kris gives an overview of the 7.0 release of jBPM! Wow, I remember when we were still at version 3! Maciej has more to say on the topic of jBPM 7 too when he dives into some changes which affect case management.

This week we've also seen some prolific activity from the various data teams. For example, William on Distributed Streams in Infinispan, Radim on the new scattered cache implementation, again in Infinispan, and Galder recapping on Reactive Big Data. And speaking of reactive systems we've got a posting for a GSoC student working on Vert.x and OpenAPI! Really good to see student activity in our projects.

Of course we've had a number of project releases, including Claus on Camel in Action 2nd Edition, Teiid 10.0.0 Alpha 1, and Keycloak 3.2.0 Final. Check out the buzz for more!

That's it for this week! See you next time!!

OK so this is an editorial meant to cover many things happening in the JBoss/middleware space for Red Hat. And whilst we'll get to a summary of some of the other things going on in  this space, I wanted to start with a reference to a recent announcement by our xPaaS Product Manager. In this article we're announcing that efforts like Vert.x, WildFly Swarm and even Spring Boot will now also be available on OpenShift. Now I kinda see this as good and there was no intention to give the impression anything else we're doing and have built up a huge user/developer base around, such as EAP or Fuse, is somehow being neglected or reduced in priority. Far from it: the EAP 7 series is a key part of xPaaS and we've worked closely with the OpenShift team to ensure it runs well there. Same goes for other Java stacks, such as Fuse or BRMS/BPMS. But some folks have perhaps read too much between the lines here and think otherwise, so I wanted to take the opportunity to make it clear that enterprise Java, in many varieties of implementation, remains our focus and priority. Whether you're interested in the established approaches such as Java EE or some of the newer efforts, like Vert.x or WildFly Swarm, Red Hat is the home for your (hybrid) cloud deployments.

With that said, onwards! Following on from the above, which is also at the heart of our microservices efforts, Bilgin has something to say on the topic as he attempts to apply psychology motivational theories to microservices - and not before time And of course no good microservices effort can ignore OpenShift, so Eric's demo of the new OpenShift 3.4 release is good timing! Now whilst Hawkular Metrics isn't microservice specific, I do expect to see it have a significant positive impact there so you should take a look at Michael's post about Pandas

Speaking of the importance of Java EE, as we were earlier, the Community Asylum this time around talks to Gunnar about Bean Validation 2.0. Separately, Ramesh talks about how the 9.2 release of Teiid now supports the SQL-MED specification.

Let's finish with some project releases, including JGroups 4.0.0, Keycloak 2.5.4, and Hibernate Search 5.7.0. Another worthy mention is the latest Node.js client release for Infinispan's Hot Rod protocol which supports cross-site client failover!

Well that's enough for this week. See you next time!

Many things happened this week but I'll take a selfish moment and start with a couple of articles I wrote. As I mentioned earlier in the week, it's been (over) 10 years since JBoss was acquired by Red Hat and it's been a great decade for open source enterprise middleware from Red Hat! Every one of our customers, partners and community members deserves a round of applause!!

Next up I had to write some clarification text around the MicroProfile work we announced back at DevNation. Take a look if you are still confused but let me summarise here for some people who appear to be unclear about how open source works: it's an upstream, open source effort to gain experience from communities, vendors and individuals, around developing microservices with enterprise Java; it's not a standard, though it going to use various standards, and eventually once we believe we have something worth standardising we'll make the right next move.

Talking about things we announced at DevNation or Summit, Eric has written a summary article for those people who couldn't make it this year. Nice to see he included the killer keynote demo In a separate article Christina writes about a JBoss Fuse Integration workshop she, Eric and Siamak did at Summit - well worth checking out!

On to some non-Summit related activities this week. Let's start with Ceylon, where Stef talks about some modularity changes in the language as well as their Android support.

We've had a few releases this week too, including the first Hibernate OGM 5 maintenance release, Teiid 9.0.1, Hawkular Services 0.0.5 Final and Hawkular Metrics 0.17.0 (well done guys, for multiple releases!). The Hawkular team also wrote about scaling stateful services. Finally for this week, Gunnar has written about how you can upgrade Hibernate ORM in WildFly, something which is a lot simpler since their latest release of Hibernate last week 5.2.1.

OK, that's it for this week. And in light of our 10 year anniversary, I'll end with: Remember we love you, and Onward!

OK let's get the sad news out of the way: one of editorial team and a key member of the JBoss family is leaving! Good luck Markus and come back soon!

Now that's out of the way we return you to our normal scheduled service. And as usual Eric has been doing a great job of pushing the OpenShift+JBoss agenda. Whether it's the Container Development Kit (CDK), with it's integration through Eclipse, or just installing OpenShift as a private PaaS, Eric always manages to get straight to the point and in an easily understandable manner.

One of our relatively newer projects, APIMan, has had a few articles in the last week. Len has written about improvements on plugin management, which is really a key area for APIMan and Policies. Eric, the project lead, has also stepped up to write about how you can republish your APIs, and how you can re-register your client apps. If you're at all interested in API Management, which cuts across a number of different areas, then check out these articles as well as the project.

In other news, we've had a really interesting article on testing and Ceylon, Heiko has written about the work they're doing with integrating JBoss Management and ManageIQ (a very important step!), and Keycloak 1.9.0.Final was released! Congrats to the team.

OK, that's it for this week. See you next week!