In last week's entry we recapped that Red Hat had acquired yet another company. This time it was Polymita.

Mark Proctor shares his thoughts on the acquisition and I'm sure we'll be hearing a lot more from him and his team and the integration of the company begins. And whilst we're on the subject of the very prolific extended Drools team, it's worth pointing you at some other things they've been up to this week including Geoffrey on Drools Planner, a very interesting article on the UIs necessary for good human task interactions (time to get involved too if this is of interest to you), and also there's the IntelliFest Drools & jBPM Workshop in San Diego next month, where you can meet the entire team.

Moving on to some non-Drools related activities, we've got more activity in the Arquillian project with the release of an alpha version of their persistence extension, the first candidate release of Seam 2.3.0 is out (congrats to the team!!). Randall has written a nice article on a new feature in ModeShape 3, that of respository backup and restore. As he says in the introduction:

"There are several reasons why you might want to restore a repository to a previous state, and many are quite obvious. For example, the application or the process it’s running in might stop unexpectedly. Or perhaps the hardware on which the process is running might fail. Or perhaps the persistent store might have a catastrophic failure (although surely you’re also using the persistent store’s backup system, too). But there are also non-failure related reasons. Backups of a running repository can be used to transfer the content to a new repository that is perhaps hosted in a different location. It might be possible to manually transfer the persisted content (e.g., in a database or on the file system), but the process of doing so varies with different kinds of persistence options.  Also, ModeShape can be configured to use a distributed in-memory data grid that already maintains its own copies for ensuring high availability, and therefore the data grid might not persist anything to disk. In such cases, the content is stored on the data grid’s virtual heap, and getting access to it without ModeShape may be quite difficult. Or, you may initially configure your repository to use a particular persistence approach that suitable given the current needs, but over time the repository grows and you want to move to a different, more scalable (but perhaps more complex) persistence approach. Finally, the backup and restore feature can be used to migrate to a new major version of ModeShape."

So take a look and provide feedback, because ModeShape 3 will be a significant advancement.

And finally for now, Eric has written something to help anyone who wants to try out the JBossWorld 2012 keynote demo for themselves at a JBUG or elsewhere!

Before we start, let me say Happy Star Wars Day!

So after last week's GSoC focus, this week we have a lot breadth to cover. Let's get straight to it with the announcement of the winners of the JBoss Community Recognition Awards! Our communities are a critical element in the success of JBoss and our projects, so being able to recognise key members of those communities is a great way for us to show our thanks. Hopefully all of these winners will be taking up the offer to come to JBoss World and we'll be sure to make them feel even more welcome than they already are. In fact one of the winners, Markus Eisele blogged about how happy he is to be recognised, so check that out too.

The Errai project just keeps delivering. Mike Brock has posted the second part of about Errai IOC and if you haven't checked out the first part then you should definitely do so. Whether you're interested in GWT, mobile or just like to follow what Mike and the team are doing, Errai is definitely a project to watch. Another one to keep an eye on is Teiid, and Ramesh discusses how the latest 8.0 release brings Data Virtualisation to AS7. And the relative newcomer to our project portfolio, AeroGear, was represented at OpenCloudConf recently by Kris, who talks about his experiences and things going on in the project.

We all know that EAP 6 is coming soon and that AS7.1 is a significant improvement over previous releases. We also know that some of that is due to EE6 being significantly better than previous versions. However, that does lead to a potential migration headache if you want to move your code from an EE5 container to EE6. Well Shane Johnson has kicked off what could be an extremely important (and interesting) series of articles on how to tackle the migration.

There were quite a few of use at Devoxx France and some had the pleasure of being caught on camera! Here's Stef, a core member of the Ceylon team, talking about the language and community involvement. And Gavin has more to say on some changes in the language too. Emmanuel, in his inimitable style, discusses Devoxx and other parts of the "French Revolution", though whether or not he is right in his title is open to debate

We have our usual series of project releases. Congratulations to the Weld team for getting Alpha2 of 2.0.0 out, with the CDI 1.1 TCK. And ModeShape 2.8.1 went final this week. If you're interested in JCR then of course you should check it out. However, ModeShape is shaping up (no pun intended!) to be far more than just JCR. If you are at all interested in NoSQL then you may find some of the features in this release and the intended 3.0 release to be relevant. Hardy and team have also pushed out Hibernate Validator 4.3.0.CR1, which they hope will be the only CR before the final release. Jesper announced the release of IronJacamar 1.0.0.Alpha7 as well as outlining the road ahead.

And it appears that the entire TorqueBox team is "happy as kids around a maypole on May Day", as they mention for the 2.0.2 release. Absolutely no comment on which team members are wearing the dresses in the picture!

Finally, don't forget that Max and team have produced the latest Asylum podcast! OK, that's it for this roundup. Enjoy!

It looks like it's my turn again to give everyone an update on the world of JBoss over the past week. Before I dive in, it's worth mentioning that next week's editorial should cover all things Devoxx related and since I was at QCon San Francisco during the week, I'm looking forward to hearing what everyone has to say too!

So we started the week with a quick look back at something that happened at JUDCon London earlier this month: the JBoss Asylum podcast, hosted as usual by Max and Emmanuel (I still expect them to open these podcasts in a very Robin Williams 'Gooooood morning JBoss' shout!) In this episode the team decided to do a panel session on Polyglot JBoss, i.e., what non-Java languages are we using or thinking of using in the future. As you can guess, this has a lot of relevance with JBoss Everywhere.

Since we're talking about JUDCon, it's worth mentioning or reminding everyone that the next event will be in just over two months time in Bangalore. If you haven't submitted something already then you should definitely get a move on, and of course don't forget to register and attend. Although we don't know yet who will be presenting, it's certain from what they've said this week that both Heiko Braun and Mark Proctor are hoping to be present and would make any JUDCon a place to be at!

Someone else who may be at JUDCon India is Kris Verlaenen, jBPM lead, and who this week had a lot to say about executable BPMN 2.0 and jBPM:

"Bruce Silver did a blog recently, wondering whether any tools already exist that truly support executable BPMN 2.0. He defines supporting executable BPMN 2.0 as not just following the graphical notation guidelines (that are probably not that different from BPMN 1.x), but also supporting the underling XML serialization. And not just the basic high-level elements, but also the details that are necessary to come to executable processes, like process data, data mappings, service interfaces, etc. I believe that jBPM satisfies these requirements!"

So check out what he has to say and also give jBPM a try. It's evolved a lot since jBPM 3 and is already a critical component by itself, but also within several other projects and platforms.

There were a couple of announcements this week related to tooling. The first was from Max, or rather Max commenting on an announcement from Google that they had finally open sourced their Eclipse plugin. As Max says: "With the open sourcing of the plugin we are looking forward to working even more closely with the Google team and the rest of the community on making the developer experience even more productive and an integrated part of Eclipse platform."

The second was from me about work we've been doing across the company on improving the developer experience for OpenShift, our public PaaS effort. There's a webinar on the subject tomorrow (21st of November), so register for that and hear from Max and others directly, as well as be able to ask your questions.

Finally we have the usual project announcements, including BoxGrinder 0.9.8, another CR for Hibernate Search 4.0.0, the first CR for Teiid 7.6, and last but by no means least, Bela talked about the jGroups 3.0.0.Final release.

OK, that's it for this week. It hasn't been as announcement-full as other weeks, but I suspect that's because everyone has been busy producing things to talk about next week!

We've been very busy over the past week, what with more Cloud/OpenShift activities, getting ready for JavaOne and JUDCon London, it's hard to know where to start. So let's dive in chronologically

• So we finally officially announced JUDCon London 2011, which is happening alongside JAX London. The Call for Presentations is short this time, due to some logistical issues, so you should hurry to get your submissions in and get registered!
• The BoxGrinder team made another release, this time version 0.9.5 (if they follow the TorqueBox naming scheme then version 1.0 may happen sometime in 2014!) The biggest change is 0.9.5 is Fedora 16 build support!
• Of course one of the bigger stories last week was when Heroku joined the Java PaaS Club. However, as Rich Sharples pointed out so eloquently, they weren't exactly very enthusiastic about it. Rich wondered why then did they bother? Of course he knew the answer and pointed it out: "Only Java gives developers such a broad range of tools, technologies and APIs – both commercial and open source. Only Java gives you Open Standard enterprisey features like Transactions, Object Persistence, Messaging, Security, Integration, scalability and high availability for when you need them." Along with a couple of nice diagrams to illustrate:

• Mark Little also posted a couple of articles about the Heroku announced, starting first with why an application server actually makes a much better Platform as a Service. As with Rich, the initial article also pulls apart some of the Heroku announcement. "Furthermore, this recent announcement is a great example of how not to build an enterprise PaaS. It's interesting to see that the example used in the announcement is HelloWorld. Somebody more cynical than I might think that it says something about the complexity and enterprise nature of the applications they can support being deployed! Now of course you can argue that you can pull together more feature rich stacks and frameworks on such thin PaaS implementations. Yes, rolling your own stack is a much better use of a developers time compared to getting one out of the box!"
• Mark's subsequent article (Why to need an enterprise platform for a PaaS) goes into much more detail on the various aspects of something like AS7 that really make it a more solid foundation for any PaaS, no matter what the language. "EE6 is a good standard that brings these and more together into a well defined stack. And AS7 is the best implementation of that standard that puts to death the old myths and FUD that Java EE is bloated and unusable ."
• Mr Security, Anil Saldhana, gave us a couple of posts about security in AS7 (SAML based) and a general posting about "man in the middle attacks", prompted by a recent issue around Google SSL certificates. Definitely worth a read, even if you're not using JBoss!
• Alessio Soldano, JBossWS project lead, had some good news for us too this week: "I've recently been offered to join the Apache CXF PMC and I accepted." Congratulations Alessio!
• Big news too was the first developer release of the 1.1 version of IronJacamar! Jesper had this to say: "On the usability front we really want to drive the way that resource adapters should be tested, so improved integration with the Arquillian and ShrinkWrap projects will have a high priority. You will see up-coming releases where having a requirement for on-disk deployment descriptors will be eliminated by using the ShrinkWrap Descriptors project and our own extensions for IronJacamar specific deployment metadata. Another area is better tooling for JCA based projects. We already have the code generator and the validator tools, but better integration with JBossTools will be important. There will also be new tools that will help people migrate from earlier releases of the JBoss Application Server. The 1.1 series will still target the Java EE Connector Architecture 1.6 specification, but we will take a look at adding support for some of the more exotic features of the specification which are optional in the sense of TCK testing."
• Brian Leathem started a new series of articles this week on the Richfaces 4 Component Development Kit (CDK). The first entry is more about setting the scene for what will follow, but you might still find it interesting and definitely worth bookmarking for future entries. As Brian says: "Before I get into specific examples, I’d first like to motivate the series by describing what exactly the CDK is and the problems that it solves.  If you already know all about JSF components, and you want to get straight into using the CDK, skip this blog post! - the rest of the entries in this series will deal purely with implementation details."
• And finally, the Hibernate team have been busy yet again! There's a new CR for Hibernate Core 4.0.0, and Emmanuel announced the 2nd Alpha release of Hibernate Search 4.0.0. Apart from bug fixes, it includes some nice new features such as near realtime searches ("Taking advantage of Lucene's new Near Realtime advancements, Hibernate Search can now search the uncommitted buffers which are still in memory, avoiding costly commits and let the IndexWriter flush periodically as it needs for optimal memory management. Note that Hibernate Search still makes sure that a Query will only see fully committed transactions (no dirty reads).") and being able to add @IndexEmbedded on collections of basic types. Lots more in there, so check it out!

OK, that's it for this week. Don't forget that you can keep up to date with everything that's going on by watching the aggregated JBoss feed!

Welcome to the first regular weekly roundup of what's been happening in the world of JBoss. As editors, our attempt here is not to replace the other streams of information that flow from JBoss projects and people, but to act as an aggregator for some of the ones that we believe are worth paying attention to. As a result this will often be a subjective view, so you may see some things focused on here that you wouldn't normally notice and others may be missing. Hopefully we can please most of the people most of the time!

So let's jump in and look back over the last week:

• Ben Browning reported on the TorqueBox's rapid progress towards their goal of making it simpler to consume the project. As Ben shows, they've made the entire TorqueBox distribution simpler to install as a gem and once installed there's even a new TorqueBox command for deploying, undeploying and running. And for those Ruby folks who use TorqueBox with RVM to manage multiple instances of Ruby (who doesn't?!), this new gem approach means there's no longer RVM specific instructions. If you're already a TorqueBox user then you probably saw Ben's post, but if not then check it out and also check out TorqueBox!
• The Infinispan team have been pulling out all the stops again recently, with Galder talks about the optimisation work they've been doing around Hibernate 4.0.0.Beta1 to improve performance when Infinispan is used as a second level cache. Now not strictly from the Infinispan team, but definitely related, TorqueBox's very own Lance Ball has also announced the release of the Infinispan Ruby client: this client gives access to a remote Infinispan data grid utilizing the Hot Rod binary protocol.
• Mark Proctor has been musing about alternative realities and specifically what might have happened if he and the Drools project hadn't joined JBoss. Not a technical presentation by any means, but Mark's always worth reading.
• Gavin has been talking more about Ceylon, this time about type inference. If you haven't read any of the other articles that Gavin's written around different aspects of Ceylon then you can find them all here. Even if you've no interest in learning a new language you'll find some interesting gems of knowledge within them.
• This week we've also seen a lot more about the JBoss World 2011 Keynote, with the engineers behind the demo getting together to produce a lot of material to dig into what was only hinted at back in May. For a start there's a dedicated Asylum Podcast, a blog post by Manik on the role Infinispan played, Jay talking about how RichFaces played a key part and more on the underlying vision of JBoss Everywhere.
• We've seen a lot from the Hibernate team this week, with Hibernate Core 4.0.0Beta1 and HibernateCore 3.6.5Final being released, as well as Hibernate Validator 4.2.0CR1 going out the door.
• Some of the team have been (will be) out and about, including Mark Little at a couple of JBUGs, and Marek Goldmann at Confitura where he presented yet more on TorqueBox, messaging and CDI! Unfortunately it seems that Mark Proctor and some of his team are stuck in sunny Rio de Janeiro because of a volcano (well that's his excuse and he's sticking to it!) So their roadshow to Argentina is on hold for now.

Well that's it for this week's roundup!