A year ago, I published my very first JBoss Weekly Editorial (at this point, you should hear in your head Moulin Rouge's version of "Like a Virgin"). This post is just a day before the (in)famous holiday of Halloween. I'm quite used to this time slot coming back to me, as a kind of twisted anniversary, the kind of anniversary, where Beetlejuice would not mind crashing. Oh, and of course, Halloween gave me a perfect excuse to Google out some more funny/geeky looking pumpkin pictures...

Infinispan

It's funny how, sometimes, some great feature of a product somehow goes unnoticed (so to speak). It appears that is the case with the cross site replication of Infinispan, but the team remedied that in this short blog entry, giving you the right pointers - especially on how to activate state transfer.

On top of that, the release of new major version, 7.0, is coming along nicely. Indeed, the Infinispan HotRod Client for .NET and for C++ were both released (CR2) early this week. If you are running on those platforms, it's perfect time for you to check out what Infinispan can do for you!

LiveOak Beta01 !

In case you missed it, LiveOak is a backend-as-a-service stack that simplifies development for mobile and standard web clients. Its goal is to enable client-side access to traditional backend services without having to write server-side code. LiveOak's fundamental architectural approach is REST to the core. LiveOak provides publish/subscribe, push-to-the-mobile-client, and REST-based APIs to shuffle data between mobile handsets, traditional desktops, and other servers in a local cluster or in the cloud.

And the project just released its first beta ! Perfect timing to have a go with it !

Teiid

Foreword; If you have still no idea what Teiid or data virtualization is about, shame on you - go listen this JBoss Asylum podcast which will tell you all about it.

The new release of Teiid is also coming nicely, as the CR2 has just been released this week. As always, community feedback is essential, so please go check it out and let us know what you think. Also, Ramesh Reddy, one of the Teiid core developers, will hold a webcast, on the 5th November on the 3 "big catches" of "big data" ( and obviously how to avoid them). Register for it !

Note that this webinar is the first of the  Beyond Big Data Webinar Series, which will feature in total five webinars.

Switchyard Primer

Kenneth Peeples just released a "Switchyard Primer" where he pulls together several topics around the product (and a special link to my coworker Jorge Morgales blog entry on some pitfalls of the contract definition with Camel and Switchyard). If you are looking for a nice deep introduction on Switchyard, this will fit the bill perfectly!

A different take on things

While the JBoss community is all about Open Source, the fact remains that even Open Source products have competitors - or at least alternatives, and it is almost always a very interesting exercise to take a hard look at yourself and your competition in order to enhance yourself (or, in this case, your product). However, it can be a daunting exercise to execute such an analysis. Fortunately,  the recently launched "Red Hat JBoss Middleware Competitive Perspectives" blog just released the second article of a series on this challenging topic:

• Analyzing tricks competitors play – Unvalidated and unchallengeable performance claims
• Analyzing tricks competitors play – making the claim that list price comparisons are misleading

Tips and tricks

Arun Gupta keeps on with his "techtips" series, and this week features the following interesting breadcrumbs:

• Securing WebSocket
• WebSocket Chat with Wildfly and OpenShift

Also, if you are running RHQ to monitor and run your systems (or the product version of it, JBoss Operations Network), you might be quite interested in the release (1.0) of the RHQ Agent Maven plugin, which allows to easily build the agent. Go check it out!

Decaf' - Docker, docker, docker...

At this stage, I will not introduce Docker. If you are reading this blog and are not aware of Docker, you probably fit into to the same kind category of people who didn't get why people talk so much about bugs, especially "Beatles" during the 60's. I don't think I can help you .

But if you are following the trend, you might find these couple of articles quite interesting:

• Openshift v3 (with Docker) - Deep Dive
• Zookeeper on Kubernetes

Despite the fact that last week many people - including me - were on holiday , the JBoss community has far from stop thriving, and numerous interesting releases happened. So, if you are yourself sitting on the beach (or somewhere else), please relax and enjoy, while this JBoss Weekly Editorial walks you through those...

Teiid comes out of the bush

Teiid is certainly a weird lizard, and very few people knows about it, but thankfully to the Emmanuel Bernard and the JBoss Asylum team, there is now a full podcast dedicated to the project, where Steve Hawkins and Ramesh Reddy explain to you in details what Teiid is all about.

This comes as a perfect opportunity to learn more about the product as the team just released 8.9 alpha 1. Time to turn your numerous and complex databases into gold and build the data you want !

Immutant 1.1.4 Released

In case you never heard of the Immutant project, know that it's an application server for Clojure, and it's built on JBoss AS7. While the 1.1.4 release is a strictly bug fix release, it's most likely to be the last release of the 1.x branch, and therefore a perfect opportunity to start discovering the product.

For those of you who like to look forward, rest assure the Immutant project is not going to stop there, and the team is now going to focus on The Deuce, the nickname for Immutant 2, which should be based on Wildfly (or EAP), but more importantly remove the current container to turn the framework into a simple librairy.

OpenShift Accelerator Program

Eric S. Schabell just announed the launch of the OpenShift Accelerator Program, an effort to both regroups initiative around the OpenShift technology, but also help people foster their own. So if you want to learn more on OpenShift, or contribute to the community by offering events, getting started or demos, checkout their website !

BRMS and BPM

BRMS is certainly a fascinating technology, but, as often with such complex project, it's difficult to know where to start. Fortunately, Eric S. Schabell has dediced, by popular demand, to revisit its "JBoss BRMS Primer - getting started with JBoss BRMS". Certainly an excellent opportunity to discover (or rediscover) what BRMS is all about, and what it can do for you...

Also, Eric took the opportunity, while meeting with Kurt Stam, founder of S-RAMP, to build a demo integrating it with DTGov and BPM !

Keycloak 1.0 Beta 4 Released

Yesterday, Bill Burke announced the release of Keycloak 1.0 Beta 4, which is quite an exciting news, as this means that 1.0 final is on the way, and should be released mid September. In case you don't know it, here is what Keycloak is about : integrated SSO and IDM for browser apps and RESTful web services. It's built on top of the OAuth 2.0, Open ID Connect and JSON Web Token (JWT) specifications.

Decaf'

While I generally use this section to point to things happening outside the JBoss community, last week has been full of Java related annoucement that should certainly interest you:

• Thermostat demo – open source monitoring tool for Hotspot JVM
• Eclipse EGit for git repo management

The JBoss community is focused on building - whether it's for instructure or middleware, or to just to design a new software and/or solutions - at the end of the day, we all build. And in this regard, certainly the last week has been quite interesting...

Out of the forges...

"Smithing makes the smith", as they used to say, and it's also by watching how other people practise their craft that one can enhance its own. To this effect, there is a lot of quite passionanting tutorial, videos and articles that was released in the last days:

• Building Airport Status Mobile App with Appery.io (video)
• Building the kjar (for BRMS) from maven command line (how to)
• Docker and Red Hat JBoss Data Virtualization (Teiid)

Of course, and as always, JBoss projects has produced their fair amount of releases, that will come as nice addition to our tool tray:

• Arquillian Persistence Extension 1.0.0.Alpha7 Released
• Infinispan 7.0.0 Alpha4 has been released and includes some interesting new features on security

"Metal on Metal" - Upgrading your Anvil

A craftman is as good as its tool set, and certainly, if you want to build and release good software, you'll need a the most performant forge possible. Well, you're in luck, the series on "Adding Java EE 7 Batch Addon to JBoss Forge ?" has released its second part this week. And it is also an excellent opportunity to this discover what one of the latest addition to the JEE spec, the Batch API, has to offer...

Getting your hands dirty with Teiid

If Teiid is well known for its graphical tool (the designer), this week Ramesh Reddy has decided to get his hands dirty, and has written a quite interesting article on "Sending Command and Audit Logging to Database". And of course, as already mentioned above, if you are interested in Teiid, take a look at Docker and Red Hat JBoss Data Virtualization (Teiid).

Time to poke around your databases for fun and profits !

Back to the roots ... or the square

A long time ago (not in a galaxy far, far away), our jobs were mostly about solving calculation. This was the days of FORTRAN and the early Unices. And even if we has moved forward and now have high level programming languages, giving us (allegdly) the ability to focuss on business problems, it remains that programming is often about... maths.

And given this premise, Gavin King recent entries on the Plus symbol or on Ranges and Slices, both for Ceylon of course, will certainly be a fruitful read. And if those are "easy-peasy" for you, you are certainly ready for "Cheating on the N Queens benchmark" by Geoffrey De Smet.

Decaf'

Docker is on the rise, and certainly, Teiid is not the only JBoss projects that would benefits from it. If you want to jump in and learn it, checkout this nice "introduction to Docker". Also on the Red Hat Developer blog, a very interesting interview of Langdon White on Software Collection and Openshift.

And a last nice little add on, I just discovered this nice article from Emmanuel Bernard on how to use git to split commit in two...

That's all the news we have for you this week, join us next week for the next installment from JBoss...

With winter finally spreading from the US to Europe, all appears to be frozen... but in the JBoss universe, those freezes are only there allow more releases and announcements ! So toss one more log in the fireplace and enjoy this new JBoss Weekly, as we walk you through them.

JBoss.org going social !

Probably the most important announcement of the week, your JBoss account on this website can now be linked to social website such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and so on. More information on this in the official Social log in announcement.

Forge 2.0.0 (Furnace)

With this brand new version, Forge will help you fire up quickly your JEE project, set up your software stack, and removing the pain and hassle of searching Google for every bits of configuration... But, don't take our word for it, go and test this Forge brand new release !

Ruby in the snow

With this dreadful, and cold, weather, you probably want to stay home and maybe play around with something new. Well, if you have not tried yet, TorqueBox just released it's last minor release, 3.0.2, before the 3.1 series. This stable released is the perfect opportunity, to download it and try to see if this mild blend of JEE and JRuby may be your new favorite flavor of "cup of Joe"...

JGroups under the sun...

The JGroups framework, which is the keystone of both JBoss AS's clustering feature and the Infinispan replication and distribution mechanisms. A large meeting in Mallorca, regrouping many members of those projects, happened two weeks ago, and JGroups's project leader, Bela Ban, took the time to share the outputs of the numerous discussions that took place there...

Keycloak first released !

Bill Burke just announced the very first release of Keycloak, an SSO authentication server and appliance for securing web applications and RESTful web services. Along with this announcement, the team produced a set of screencasts to help you understand quickly how to set up and use this server in your project.

Keycloak already supports OAuth and CORS, but also integration with social broker, such as Facebook or Google. It comes with the admin console, but also with an integration with OpenShift, to easily deploy the server in the cloud... Go test it !

Talks, talks, talks ... and books

• From JEE to mobile: Mobile is certainly everywhere now days, and it may be time to consider bringing your JEE apps into this new realm. It may sounds complex, difficult or maybe even impossible, but once you will have seen Serge and Burr's talk on the topic, all will become clear... So don't forget to register for the Red Hat Summit 2014 in San Francisco !
• Camel Workshop: Last week, Claus Ibsen did a talk and a workshop on Camel - featuring also Fabric8, at the Barcelona's JUG. More information on his blog...
• JBoss EAP 6 High Availability by Packtpub: Arun Gupta just released a brief review of the recently published JBoss EAP 6 High Availability by PacktPub Book Review.

That's all folk !

As always, the JBoss ecosystem continues to thrive and grow - making for many, many exciting events, announcements and releases.  It is a lot to keep up with so follow our This Week in JBoss blog for your weekly summaries.

For starter, let us wish you all a Happy Halloween ! This Halloween fell like heaven for us, because we just learned that Red Hat has been reelected to JCP-EC, which is both a fantastic news and a recognition of our contribution to the Java Community.

Indeed, even before its acquisition by Red Hat, JBoss has been an active member of the Java Community Process for around ten years. The numerous votes on our favor is a testimony to the value of this collaboration. Let us paraphrase here, what Mark Little wrote in his blog entry: "thanks to all the voters (whether you voted for us or not ), to whom we promise to keep up the good work"...

Back from the dead !

The JCache specification has released the final version of its 1.0. While not really dead, the specs was almost dormant for years, and it is really nice to see it finally going forward. InfiniSpan already supports the version 0.7 of the API, and should be updated to support this latest version of the specification in the coming weeks...

Still biting

While the years of the raging wars around dependency injection - then called inversion of control, are long gone, the community around Weld has certainly not stop its work. Indeed, the project has just released its version 2.1.0-Final, which contains, on top of the usual (but still appreciated) performance enhancement and bug fixes, the support for OSGI, using the PAX-CDI (reference implementation for RFC-193).

Apocalypse survivor

Both the JAX London and the Open Shift workshop done there by Eric D. Schabel survived the mega storm that hit great Britain capital ! However, if despite this good omen you were not among the happy few (like me) to participate to this event, Andrew Miller just released a book on "Implementing OpenShift".

Mort(gage) demo

On top the previous workshop, Eric D. Schabell found the time to release a pretty awesome demo for the JBoss BPM suite. If you want to have a first look at the coming version 6 of the product, you should definitely check it ! You can go even one step further, and learn how to install the demo itself.

Something old this way comes

The IT Business used to be focused on batch processing applications, and many technologies that predates Java and JEE, were quite good at it. With the rise of the web, and the coming of JEE application server, the need for batch applications did not really went away, but strangely enough, had never been a focus for the JCP. Finally, this gap has been filled by the creation of the JSR 352,Batch Applications for the Java Platform.

The release of this new specification, inspired by the success of Spring Batch, triggered the creation of a new JBoss project, called, JBeret. It's still a beta, but it's is still worth mentioning the project have released its first version.

Note: JBeret is awesome name that was proposed for the rename of JBoss AS. Sadly, people, at the time, failed to recognized the value and high quality of it, and went for Wildfly (also awesome). Fortunately, it was not lost to everybody

"Sallah, I said no camels!"

As he is surprisingly often for such an heroic character, Indiana Jones was quite wrong about that - we certainly need Camel . Especially with the recent release of Red Hat JBoss Fuse. So, it's definitely time to brush up on it, and, with a great sense of timing, a new book on the topic, Instant Apache Camel Messaging System, has just been released !

Test driven infected

If you are "test driven infected" as any good Java/JEE person should be, you'll be happy to hear that the Arquillian project has just released not one, but two new extensions with the version 1.0.0,  Arquillian REST Extension and  Arquillian Transaction Extension.

Decaf'

After five espresso and a latte, it's probably a good idea to have a decaf... The same logic applies to Java and JBoss - sometimes, it's good to take a look at what is happening elsewhere. Especially when it comes to tools that some many Java developers uses, like SVN. So, if you are still using SVN, and you are getting tired of being laught at by all those "cool kids" using git, take a look at this article and learn how to use git as a SVN client... (yeah, I know, this is obvious self promoting, but people stuck on SVN will thanks me...)

Photo by Lotzman Katzman.