Yes it's that time of year again when a lot of the world starts to think about Father Christmas, festive cheer and snowmen! JBoss and Red Hat are no different, but despite this it's also been a busy time for us here. Maybe the snowmen have been helping us out?!

The Vert.x community have been asynchronously hard at work (see what I did there ?) with automatic redeployment in Eclipse. And talking about Eclipse, as Alexey mentions we're hiring again for the team so if you've any interest then get in touch! Ho ho ho, let's not forget about the JBoss Tools maintenance release either!

Two of our most prolific authors have been making their lists, checking them twice and writing about a lot of interesting things: Eric, who has been writing about all things BRMS related for a very long time, presents his audience with a lovely Christmas present of the Ultimate Collection of BRMS Demos, and if that wasn't enough he has a quick tour of importing a project into BRMS. Meanwhile Markus has written about the latest EAP 7 Beta release, just in time for those people with time on their hands on Christmas day. And conveniently he also has the second part of his refresher on EE7 backend features.

If that isn't enough for you, Markus also managed to find time to write an article and associated video about getting started with EAP 7 quickstarts! Phew!

Now if EAP 7 beta isn't enough for you both Jason and Alessio have a few things to say about the latest candidate release of WildFly 10. So let's finish with Davide's article on Cassandra integration with Hibernate OGM 5.0.0 Beta1 and Christina's entry about different ways in which you can develop Fuse applications. I hope you've enjoyed these additional Christmas presents and we see you all after the day. Enjoy and remember: we love you!

This week has seen a lot of activity around DevOps and microservices. I'll shamelessly start with plugging a few things I've written on the subject, such as how you should look at microservices and Linux containers (such as Docker) for the natural unit of failure within a microservices environment:

"If you are building multiple microservices, or using them from other groups and organisations, within your applications or composite service(s), then do some thinking about how they are related and if they should fail as a unit then pull them together into a single image."

I also wrote an addendum to that article the other day just to make it clear that whilst containers such as Docker are useful, their neither necessary nor sufficient for microservices, especially in the Java world:

"If you're thinking about developing microservices in Java then you don't have to worry about using Linux containers: your unit of failure is the JVM. Start there and built upward."

I also wrote about how state can be handled with microservices, especially in a DevOps/cloudy environment where Linux containers are used and typically assumed to me immutable. Hopefully people find these articles useful - I certainly found them fun to write. Then in a semi-related article, Eric wrote about Docker and integration/BPM projects - lots of nice demos there! Everyone is looking at Linux containers/Docker these days, including the Keycloak team where Marko wrote about clustering recently.

Now some of our projects and products that are at the forefront of the things we're doing around microservices and DevOps are Fuse, Camel and Fabric8. Christina wrote about how to (lazily) create an offline repository. Christian took time to write generally about Enterprises and Microservices (part 1), but also how to do continuous delivery with Fabric8 v1. Claus has written a great "getting started with Fuse" article, so check it out if you're new to Fuse. Marek has written an entry on securing Fuse and Hawtio applications with Keycloak, which is a critical requirement for enterprise deployments.

In other news Kenny mentions the upcoming Red Hat virtual event Building Data-driven Solutions for the Internet of Things on April 23 at 11 a.m. (EST) / 15:00 (GMT). Sign up now! And the Arquillian and TorqueBox teams release new versions - 1.0.0 Alpha 5 (Docker extensions) and 3.1.2 respectively.

OK that's it for this week! Onward!

It's Christmas! As has become a tradition, on this day we don't create the weekly editorial but leave it to the interested reader to go and read the blog feeds, rather than have us summarise. You don't quite know what you're going to get, so think of it as a an extra Christmas present from us to you

It's been a great year for Red Hat as a whole and especially JBoss. Sales continue to grow apace. Adoption of our products and projects across a much wider range of sectors increases year on year. We're no longer the 2nd choice of customers but their 1st choice. And we've gone from being challenger to the challenged, which is a good sign but also means we need to keep pushing forward. None of this would have been possible without team work from inside and outside Red Hat. Our community of customers and upstream project users (and contributors from both) are an essential part of what we are and how we work. You are what makes this worthwhile. Your feedback, patches, code donations and all types of involvement help energise our projects and products; we're a team and a family!

This year has also seen us expand the JBoss family with the acquisition of the FeedHenry team, who are already making the right connections and finding a lot of interest in what they bring. I know there are great things ahead as we integrate them with our existing products, such as EAP and xPaaS. So it has definitely been a great year for us in more ways than one. Christmas gives us all an opportunity to try to step back and take a well earned rest. However, I know many of you and our teams will be beavering away over Christmas regardless (I know I will be too, with some of my pet projects) but do try and enjoy this time of year and recharge your batteries in whatever way makes sense to you.

OK, it's time to get back to the turkey, Christmas pudding and wine. I wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Onward!

This week has seen a continued push around Containers (Docker) and JBoss, with Mr Docker Marek Goldmann writing about running Docker as systemd services. There are some really nice examples in the entry too.

We had a one-day JUDCon event a few weeks back and Andrew Rubinger has written up a piece about it as well as linking to a number of videos recorded at the event. It certainly sounds as if this event went well and maybe we'll plan some other one-day events like this in the future! If you attended and have written up your own experiences (good or bad) then let us know too so we can all learn from what worked and what didn't work. Congratulations to the Mobile team for the release of Beta 1 of the Unified Push Server! Not strictly just mobile related, but Max has also blogged about JBoss Tools 4.2 Beta 3, which contains support for Cordova and OpenShift, to name but two!

In addition to JUDCon, there have been several other community-oriented events happening or announced, including the JavaForum in Stuttgart, the ATL-JBUG meeting coming up in August with a focus on Fuse Service Works and Docker (more containers).

The various project teams have been hard at work as usual. Vladimir writes about the performance of Map/Reduce in Infinispan 7.0.0; Bilgin discusses how people can write components for Camel; John has a lot to say about starting an ActiveMQ project in Eclipse and with Maven; and both Bela and Tristan have different things to talk about around large scale data grids, with Bela showing off the new record 500 node JDG cluster and Tristan cross-posting a link to Navin's video on cross data centre replication with JDG. And finally for this month's roundup, we've also had a bit of an IoT theme. Kenny Peeples writes about an article over on DZone which discusses IoT and mentions JBoss A-MQ; and yours truly discusses Enterprise IoT.

OK, that's it for this week!

It can't have gone unnoticed that Summit and DevNation are getting closer.

If you haven't registered yet then there's still time! Check out the agendas and you'll see that we've got some great sessions, and Arun outlines a few. And some of those sessions are influenced by, or directly related to, the things going on this week in JBoss. For instance, the HornetQ team has announced integration with Vert.x; you can read up on the latest around JDG, comparing it with Coherence; and Geoffrey has some interesting things to say about MapReduce and OptaPlanner. But one of the most important topics next month is around the new BPMS Platform, which is reflected in the video that Kris and Prakash gave, and Eric also has a nice writeup and demo video. And of course it'll be in a Cloud near you soon!

Elsewhere we've had a couple of Hibernate releases (4.3.4.Final and 4.2.10.Final) and Validator, Arquillian Jacoco 1.0.0 Alpha 6 and Drone 1.2.4.Final, and other projects you should check out. Christian has also written a nice article on Errai Data Sync.

As well as releasing BPMS Platform, Kris has also got some GSoC projects, which he's written about.

And finally, Arun has done something everyone should be interested in (at least if you believe my 11 year old son!) Minecraft on OpenShift!

OK that's it for this week. A lot going on and I'm sure much more to come next week!

Let's start with Happy Thanksgiving to our American audience (unless you're a turkey, of course, where it's probably not such a good day - hey, wait until Christmas!)

This week has been hectic, even without all of the Thanksgiving preparations I'm sure many people have been caught up by. What with the obligatory Devoxx catch up from Dimitris and then one of our newest hires (Arun Gupta, ex Oracle) posting about the death of commercial GlassFish, I'm not sure where to begin! Let's start by looking Ceylon. The team have a few things to say this week after the 1.0 release at Devoxx, including a discussion about typesafety and expressiveness, and the CLI. If you haven't checked out Ceylon yet then this is a good opportunity, especially if you're looking for something to do while the turkey cooks or gets digested!

Maciej has essentially written up a Getting Started tutorial for jBPM 6, complete with videos. His colleagues have also been busy. Edson, for instance, has written about the new Drools Developers' Guide, whilst Geoffrey has been making OptaPlanner work in Camel. As usual, the EAP/WildFly team has found time (how?) to write about cool features such as WebSockets, the clustering reference architecture, and WildFly meets Docker.

Before moving on to the usual list of new releases, it's worth calling out Kurt's article on SOA Governance for special mention. Kurt and the team have been working actively on this for a long time and the results are spectacular. Check out his article and give feedback!

OK, so to finish off we've had a lot of releases again this week, including TorqueBox 3.0.1, Arquillian OSGi support 2.1.0CR2, a new version of Arquillian's JRebel extension, and the 1.1.0 Final release of SwitchYard! Congratulations to all of the teams and communities involved! Let's see what happens next week!

Summit may be over for another year, but everyone is still recovering in one way or another. But despite this, we've had a busy week so here are the highlights!

The Arquillian team and community have been extra busy over the past few days, what with releases of TestRunner Spock (got to love the name!), Warp, the Guice extension, and the Spring extension! Well done to everyone involved. If you're interested in testing, then you really should check these out. Never one to be outdone, the Errai team have pushed out a lot of their own releases too over the last couple of weeks and Christian explains why in a separate posting. But these include JPA Data Sync, which is a great addition to the project!

Of course with Summit last week we've seen a lot of postings on the event and how it went, including the obligatory Asylum podcast, one from myself (I'm not usually into self-publicity, but there are some good photos) and another from Eric. And speaking of Eric, he's given us a sneak peek at a new BAM component coming your way very soon!

Shane talks about a new project (Windup) and how it can be used to assist in migrations from other application servers to JBoss implementations. The end goal is to try to automate as much of this as possible as well as assit in JBoss-to-JBoss migrations. Since it's all open source, if you have a need for this kind of tool then you should definitely check it out and get involved.

Finally of course we've had our usual flurry of other project releases, including 1.3.1 Final of Forge, PicketBox XACML version 2.0.9, and the second candidate release of Infinispan 5.2.0.

OK, until next time, happy reading! I'll leave you with a reminder of where Summit will be next year too!

This week's editorial will be Cloudy with a touch of Enterprise PaaS, a bit of NoSQL moving in from the north, and maybe some sunshine later in the day! So let's start with some big news: we just announced OpenShift Enterprise, with EAP and EWS support! So if you're happy with your current infrastructual investments (hardware, middleware etc.) and just want to sprinkle some cloud pixy dust around and make it even more efficient, why not give the on-premise version of OpenShift a try? And our very own Eric Schabell has posted a link to a video he did on JBoss and Java in the cloud.

OK, but what about the NoSQL I hear you ask? Well hot on the heals of their latest release, Randall Hauch has posted a link to a presentation he's given on an Introduction to ModeShape 3. Don't let the JCR heritage behind ModeShape dissuade you from checking this out. If you're interested in NoSQL, graph-oriented or doc-oriented, then this is well worth a look!

There have been a lot of other things going on in JBoss-land this week, including the extended Drools team doing their usual impression of a team 10 times their size! Hmmm, or maybe Mark Proctor is cloning them

Anyway, they started with a lot of jBPM 5 related work such as a presentation at the London JBUG, a presentation on the new console work that's just been kicked off, Tihomir wrote about the designer, and Kris finished it off with the release of version 5.4! And Eric again has more than a thing or two to say about BRMS and BPM which is worth a viewing!

Another team that often hits above its weight, is Arquillian (appropriate I suppose, given the name's heritage):

First the team announced the 5th Alpha of the Jacoco extension and then Jay has written about how the RHQ team have been moving to the latest version of JBossAS, the challenges that presents around testing and how Arquillian (the project, not the little alien) has come to the rescue! Some good experience work here to be leveraged elsewhere, especially if you're considering upgrading to AS7.

Before moving on to other news, it's worth mentioning that one of our often unsung heroes, Marek Goldmann, has done yet another great job of integrating AS7 with Fedora in terms of RPMs and distribution. Since Marek joined the team several years ago, he's worked with Bob McWhirter and a host of others, but the work he's doing at the moment is crucial to the larger JBoss audience. Well done Marek!

Finally we've had a few other project releases, including IronJacamar 1.1.0.Beta 3, Bean Validation 1.1 Beta 2 and yet another update from the HornetQ team. And in fact Emmanuel lets us know that public review of Bean Validation 1.1 has been approved by the JCP.

Well that's about it for this week. Check back next week to see what our clones have been up to!