I'm writing this as we wrap up another successful Red Hat Summit. But this year, with a significant distinction: the event was 100% virtual. Despite the involuntary move to virtual, there were many benefits that came about from the change in format. The event was completely free, and of course required no travel, allowing a much broader and more diverse set of attendees to benefit from the content and experience. It was also ran in three regions to accommodate many more timezones.

Being Red Hat we were keen to experiment with the format and find new ways to engage with the community. It was important for us to carry over as much of the personality and intimacy of the physical event as possible. So, this needed to be more than just a bunch of streamed talks. The talks were pre-recorded which allowed the presenter(s) to participate directly in the Q&A in real-time as the talk proceeded. There was also a variety of sessions that went beyond the talk format. For examples see Ask the experts, Networking social hour, and the Virtual Open Neighborhood on the agenda.

If you weren't able to attend, or want to catch some of the talks you missed, you can re-live the virtual event here.

In other news...

Quarkus Insights on Youtube Live

This week Max Andersen and Emmanuel Bernard kicked off a new video/podcast series bringing insights into Quarkus. Each episode will focus on a guest speaker discussing the development or usage of Quarkus. There are also some dedicated Q&A sessions planned. Be sure to subscribe to the Quarkus YouTube channel to catch these sessions and other exciting Quarkus content. In particular join them on the 4th of May where Georgios Andrianakis will talk about Quarkus testing and specifically the new mocking improvements in the recently released Quarkus 1.4.

Kogito: A Modular Codegen Design Proposal

In this post Edoardo Vacchi explains how Kogito is improving performance by moving processing out of the run-time and into build-time.

Red Hat Summit 2020 - Ask the Experts: Hybrid Multicloud Pitfalls

In one of the many Ask the Experts sessions, Eric Schabell & Roel Hodzelmans focused on their hybrid multi-cloud pitfall theories. You can view the slides here, or register for the Red Hat Summit Virtual event to re-watch the content on demand.

Free book on Knative covering Camel K and Kafka and upcoming webinar with live demos

In this post Claus Ibsen alerts us to the free eBook written by Burr Sutter & Kamesh Sampath on the subject of Knative. Go get your free copy here!

Red Hat Summit 2020 - Business Automation Sessions

If you are interested in the area of Business Automation, be sure to view Kris Verlaenen's helpful summary of all the BI related talks held at Red Hat Summit.

Demystifying the Event Driven Architecture - An introduction (part 1)

Eric Schabell has started a new blog series that explores the world of Event Driven Architectures (EDA).

Six reasons why you will love Camel K

Interested in Camel K, or want to find out what all the fuss is about? Read on, and Christina will give you six reasons to love Camel K.

Hybrid clouds with JGroups and Skupper

Bela Ban follows up on his post explaining how to span JGroups Kubernetes-based clusters across Google and Amazon clouds. In this new post Bela improves on the process by using Skupper to simplify this task and encrypt the data exchanged between different clouds.

This Week's Releases

• Quarkus 1.4. Command mode, HTTP 2, New FaaS framework, Mocking, and more.
• Keycloak 10.0.0. With Identity Brokering Sync Mode, Client Session Timeout for OpenID Connect / OAuth 2.0 and much more.
• Kogito 0.9.1. This release is a bug fix release, but there has also been considerable work spent on documentation and code examples. See the link for detais.

Read on to find out the latest from the JBoss community...

DevNation Live: Quarkus – Hibernate with Panache

In this tech talk you will learn from Emmanuel Bernard about Hibernate Panache. Hibernate ORM with Panache focuses on the typical use cases, making your entities trivial and fun to write in Quarkus.

DevNation Live: Revisiting Effective Java in 2019

Joshua Bloch has given us the third edition of Effective Java, but almost 10 years have passed since the last edition. And, now we have a whole generation of Java developers who could benefit from this knowledge. In this tech talk, we hear from Edson Yanaga who explains what’s new in the updated Effective Java and adds some more tips not included in the book.

5 Questions Everyone's Asking About Microservices (Question 1)

Eric Schabell has observed that there are 5 common questions he's asked when meeting with existing and potential customers. In this series he tackles each one in turn. In part one he'll be answering:

“How to approach the performance impact in communications when a monolith gets split up into distributed services (microservices), such as from internal calls to distributed REST APIs?”

Stay tuned for part 2 where he'll be discussing how to deal with state after splitting up monolithic applications.

Recent Drools DMN open source engine performance improvements

The Drools community are always looking for ways to improve the performance of the Drools DMN open source engine. They have recently reviewed a DMN use-case where the actual input population of Input Data nodes varied to some degree; this highlighted a suboptimal behavior of the engine, which we improved in recent releases. In this post Matteo Mortari shares their findings.

Beginners Guide - Building an Online Retail Web Shop Workshop (Technical Rules)

With the release of Red Hat Decision Manager 7.3 Eric Schabell has started updating his free online workshop, a beginners guide to building an online retail web shop. In this post Eric explains how to create Technical Rules with Red Hat Decision Manager.

Business Process Management News

Eric Schabell continues his "Modern Process Integration Tooling Workshop" series with parts four and five. These instalments focus on creating a business process. Eric will be delivering the full workshop on the 7th of March in Edinburgh for JBUG:Scotland. See here for more details. Whilst  working on the workshop, Visual Studio users can try the jBPM plugin for quickly viewing process diagrams.

In other news JHipster users can now generate jBPM Business apps with it. See here for more details.

Other News

Transitioning Red Hat SSO to a highly-available hybrid cloud deployment

About two years ago, Red Hat IT finished migrating our customer-facing authentication system to Red Hat Single Sign-On. This article describes how we’re now addressing database and session replication between global sites.

Announcing Kubernetes-native self-service messaging with Red Hat AMQ Online

On January 30th Red Hat announced Red Hat AMQ Online. This new offering combines the best features of Red Hat’s rock-solid AMQ product with the cloud accessibility of Red Hat OpenShift. This new feature from the Red Hat Integration solution allows service administrators to deploy and manage messaging infrastructure, while user teams (tenants) can request messaging resources, both using Kubernetes-native APIs and tools. Read the article to learn more.

Effortless API creation with full API lifecycle using Red Hat Integration (Part 1)

This article, which is the first in a series of three articles, describes how the new Red Hat Integration bundle allows citizen integrators to quickly provide an API through tools that make creating an API in five simple steps effortless.

Hibernate Community Newsletter 04/2019

If your a developer using Hibernate, you'll likely find this roundup of the latest Hibernate news of interest.

Monitor active management operations and detect non-progressing operations

In this post Harald Pehl explains how to monitor management operations in the WildFly application server. This hands-on post walks you through how to list and cancel active management operations as well as detecting those that are failing to progress.

New Releases

• Hibernate ORM 5.3.8.Final. Focuses on compatibility bug fixes.
• Hibernate Validator 6.0.15.Final. Fixes an important issue related to the usage of @GroupSequence: See: HV-1692.
• HAL 3.1.2. Contains various new features, bug fixes and enhancements.
• JGroups 4.0.17. Inlcudes one fix that ensures JGroups handles concurrent leaving of nodes correctly. See: JGRP-2293

It's that time of year again and the Red Hat Summit conference in San Francisco is rapidly approaching. Expect to see a flurry of product and project releases, over the coming weeks, as the teams prepare to announce their latest and greatest offerings.

If you're planning on attending Red Hat Summit, you can read here, to get a preview of the sessions covering modern application development.

In the first part of this series James Falkner explores the Istio project and how Red Hat is actively involved, working to integrate it into Kubernetes and OpenShift. This integration brings the benefits of a service mesh to our customers and the wider communities involved.

In this post Don Schenck talks about testing for failures in your distributed application. Testing how your application responds to network unreliability is traditionally very hard to do. However, in this post Don shows how this can be done with ease by injecting faults into your application running in an Istio service mesh.

In the fourth post of Clement Escoffier's “Introduction to Eclipse Vert.x.” series, he shows how you can use JDBC in an Eclipse Vert.x application using the asynchronous API provided by the vertx-jdbc-client. But before diving into JDBC and other SQL subtleties, Clement provides a primer on Vert.x Futures.

In this post Michal Petrov gives a status update on the RichFaces community. Red Hat stopped contributing to the RichFaces codebase almost two years ago, however there are still many people using the technology. In this post Michal talks about what the RichFaces community are doing to continue to support those users.

New Releases

• Hibernate Search 5.10.0.Beta2. This release mainly includes an upgrade to WildFly 12 for the JBoss modules, but it also adds a few bug-fixes and improvements
• WildFly Swarm 2018.4.1
• Byteman 4.0.2. This is the latest release for use on JDK9+ runtimes. It is also recommended as the preferred release for use on JDK8- runtimes.

Welcome to the weekly roundup from the JBoss Community. Read on for an overview of the week's news and releases.

As many are coming back to work after the Thanksgiving holiday, we are seeing a flurry of bog posts and a significant number of Arquillian releases. Read on to find out more...

Back from Madrid JUG and Codemotion Madrid!!

Galder Zamarreño & Thomas Segismont attended the Codemotion Madrid conference. In this post Galder talks about the conference and in particular their talks. These talks covered data analytics using Infinispan-based data grids and streaming data with Infinispan, Vert.x and OpenShift.

AppDev in the Cloud with Financial Customer Evaluation Solution

In this post Eric Schabell shows us how to get started with the Customer Evaluation Demo using the JBoss BPM Suite on OpenShift Container Platform.

Introducing the Hibernate Search JSR 352 mass indexing job

Originally started as a Google Summer of Code project by Mincong Huang, Hibernate Search 5.9 will feature integration with JSR 352, "Batch Applications for the Java Platform". This integration provides a new implementation of mass indexing (indexing a high volume of entities) as a JSR 352 job. Read this post to learn more.

Releases

• Arquillian Container Chameleon 1.0.0.Beta3. With support for WildFly 11.
• Arquillian Container GlassFish 1.0.2. With support for Glassfish 5.
• Arquillian Smart Testing 0.0.5. This release ships with several API improvements making integration with 3rd party tools much easier.
• Arquillian Universe 1.1.15.0. The Arquillian Universe BOM is a 'Bill of Material' Maven POM file collection that make up a module stack that stretch across the whole Arquillian Universe.
• Arquillian Core 1.1.15.Final. Includes support for newer versions of TestNG.
• Hibernate Search 5.9.0.Beta1. Includes an implementation of a new mass indexer, based on the JSR 352 specification, "Batch Applications for the Java Platform".

The big news this week is...

WildFly 11 Final was released this week. As you would expect for a major WildFly release, it comes with many significant improvements. Including:

• Elytron - New Security Infrastructure. The biggest change in WildFly 11 is unification on a new common security framework across the full application server.
• Simplified EJB / Naming Proxies. JNDI and EJB invocation have both been simplified and enhanced in WildFly 11.
• Request oriented EJB/JNDI over HTTP.
• WildFly OpenSSL & HTTP/2. WildFly 11 now provides a JSSE provider that can offload TLS handling from the JVM’s internal implementation to an OpenSSL library on your system, typically improving TLS performance.
• New Load-Balancer Configs. In order to simplify the setup of WildFly as an HTTP load-balancer, there is an additional standalone-load-balancer.xml configuration in the distribution, which is an instance slimmed to just running the load balancing services.
• Graceful Shutdown/Startup Improvements. Distributed transactions are now handled by the graceful shutdown mechanism.
• Web Console Improvements. A number of Web Console improvements are included in WildFly 11, including the ability to see recent configuration changes, to manage active JMS transactions, manage active batch jobs, manage Undertow filters, and test data-sources during creation.
• Management and Configuration Improvements. WildFly 11 now supports remote managed exploded deployments, which allows remote management clients the ability to update content within the deployment, such as html and jsp files without requiring a full redeployment.

Read more here.

Microservices & Microprofile

It's been a busy week for Microservices content. Christian Posta continues his series on Low-risk Monolith to Microservice Evolution, which looks to be a great writeup for those planning a migration to a Microservices architecture. Ken Finnigan provides a step-by-step guide to setting up data streaming with WildFly Swarm and Apache Kafka. Cesar Saavedra continues his guide on setting up a MicroProfile-based microservice on OpenShift Container Platform. Finally, Heiko Rupp explains how to monitor an Eclipse MicroProfile 1.2 server with Prometheus.

Other News

• Elvadas Nono provides a tutorial on building and consuming virtual Microdatabases with JBoss Data Virtualization.
• Eric Schabell continues his blog series on 10 Steps to Cloud Happiness. In this post he focuses on Centralising Business Logic.
• Vlad Mihalcea interviews Lukas Eder, a Java Champion, SQL aficionado, and data access framework developer.
• Claus Ibsen explains how to work with large messages using Apache Camel and ActiveMQ Artemis.

Releases

• WildFly 11 Final
• Teiid 10.0.0.CR2
• Hibernate Validator 6.0.4.Final
• Smart Testing 0.0.3
• Teiid 9.3.4
• JGroups 4.0.8

This week we are seeing a lot of activity around WildFly Swarm, in additional to the usual set of releases you have come to expect from the JBoss Community.

Microservices with WildFly Swarm

WildFly Swarm allows you to optimise your Java EE application for Microservice deployments, by packaging them with just enough of the server runtime to "java -jar" your application. Watch the interview with project lead, Ken Finnigan, to learn more. Also, you can learn about the latest release here.

WildFly Swarm is also Eclipse MicroProfile compliant. Learn here  how the Eclipse MicroProfile initiative is rapidly bringing Microservices support to Java EE, in a fully open way, despite the slowing pace of Java EE specification releases.

Elsewhere, Pavol Loffay on the Hawkular team shows us how to rapidly setup a JAX-RS application using Wildfly Swarm’s app generator. He then instruments the application, showing you how to trace the business layer logic and add custom-data to the trace.

Releases

• Teiid 9.3.1. The latest bug-fix release of Teiid. The next preview release of 10.0 will be due out in about 2 weeks.
• Hibernate Validator 6.0.0.CR3. With Bean Validation 2.0.0.CR3 support and several other fixes and improvements.
• Bean Validation 2.0 CR 3 Specification. Bean Validation 2.0 CR 3 has been released and submitted to the JCP for final approval ballot. Stay tuned to track progress.