Rapid Java EE Development Using Forge 2

Arun Gupta has spent time this week putting together a screen cast to show how easy it is to create a Java EE application using the Forge 2 Command Line Interface.  Arun demonstrates how to easily create JPA entities, add Bean Validation, include JSF scaffolding and REST endpoints and finally how to deploy the working application to JBoss EAP running on OpenShift.

Immutant 2 in the Works

The Immutant team are starting their development efforts on Immutant 2 with their main aim being the provision of a set of libraries, one for each of the commodity services, that are independent of the application server. This will allow you to embed those libraries in your application without requiring a "container" to be fully functional.  For those looking to take advantage of some of the container's facilities, such as as security, monitoring, clustering and more, it will also be possible to deploy your application into a stock WildFly or EAP container without the need to modify your application code.

Cleaning up Old JIRAs

Managing an Open Source project that has been going on for over 10 years presents a number of unique problems, one of which is how to deal with any old JIRAs that have been created.  This is a problem currently being faced by the Hibernate ORM team who find themselves with over 3000 outstanding issues, most of which they believe are no longer relevant to the current codebase.  The team has recently given some thought on this problem and have come up with a proposal.  If this topic is of interest to you then be sure to check out their post and add your thoughts to the discussion.

On the Road

San Francisco is going to be a very busy place over the next few weeks with the arrival of DevNation, April 13th-17th, and Red Hat Summit, April 14th-17th.  DevNation will have a very strong focus on the developer community with presentations on technologies such as Camel, SwitchYard, Drools, jBPM and many more.  The majority of the presentations will be given by those who are experts in technologies, providing a fantastic opportunity to discuss, in person, any topics that may be of interest.  Friday 11th of April will also see Mark Proctor giving a presentation at Square, discussing what is currently happening within the Drools projects.

The Red Hat offices in Amsterdam will be hosting a series of Hackathons over the next few months, providing an opportunity for some hands-on experience with various technologies.   The first Hackathon takes place next Thursday, April 10th, however spaces are limited so be sure to register before they run out.

Eric recently spent some time in Toronto, Canada, where he had the honour of giving a presentation on JBoss Rules and BPM at the Toronto Java Users Group.  He was joined on stage by Jonathan Feurth who was giving a presentation on Thread Safety.  Eric was also in Toronto for a partner workshop where he gave presentations based on his series of online workshop posts, the latest instalment of which covers the steps necessary for creating a Domain Specific Language.

New Releases

• The Hibernate team have two releases this week with Brett announcing the release of Hibernate ORM 4.3.5.Final and Sanne announcing the release of Hibernate Search 5.0.0.Alpha3.
• The Arquillian team also have two releases this week with Aslak announcing the release of Arquillian Core 1.1.4.Final and Stefan announcing the release of Arquillian Droidium 1.0.0.Alpha5.
• Claus has an announcement covering the release of hawtio 1.3.0 and the progress that has been made towards the first fabric8 community release.
• The Teiid team have announced the release of Teiid 8.7 CR1.
• The Infinispan team have announced the release of Infinispan 7.0.0.Alpha2, incorporating Cross-Site Replication State Transfer in a stable topology.

Last week was a miss, so this week, the JBoss Weekly Editorial comes back with a packed edition - to be sure that you miss nothing of what has happen since the 6th of march ! Hope you enjoy this one even more !

Wildfly on JBoss Asylum

If, like me, you have little time to read but spend a lot of time standing in line, in the plane or in the train, you'll be quite happy to hear that the JBoss Asylum team has just released a new podcast on Wildfly. Probably the simplest way to learn about it and all the current works and enhancements in Wildfly, don't miss it !

The podcast covers many topics from the management, security, handling of datasources, using the CLI, or the brand new web server, Undertow - which is focused on high performance and stability.

Last nice item on Wildfly, and following the discontinuation of Glassfish, Arun Gupta has write up a nice blog entry on migrating from Glassfish to Wildfly...

Infinispan, to boldly go where no one has gone before

The infinispan project and community keep reaching new horizons and cross new frontiers. The first one being the frontier of C# ! Indeed, a brand new Hot Rod C# client for Infinispan has been released. You can now scale your C# applications using the Infinispan as in-memory cache or a data grid.

Along those line, it's also quite exciting to learn that Hot Rod is also now available in OSGI ! With all of that, there is less and less reason to NOT used Infinispan ...

Also, this week have seen the first release - at least, after 13 years ! - of the JCache API (JSR 107). Within the JBoss universe, Infinispan is the implementation of this specification, but most importantly, the specification allow you to leverage infinispan within your Java app - or even JEE application, in a standard, portable fashion.

At last, to be sure, no one can stop (for legal) reason, the "USS Infinispan" to cross its final frontier, the release 6.0.2, includes  ASL2-licensed JBoss Marshalling.

BRMS & BPM : no rest for the wicked

Eric Schabell does not know how to stop, and has again released some pretty cool materials on BRMS, including an online workshop, a blog entry on BPM support for matrix Control Workflow Patterns, and a very cool preview of a Process Designer (on Openshift !). All those material are up to date with the latest of the release of JBoss  BPM 6 (based on jBPM 6).

If you want to learn more about this later release, a JBoss BPM 6 webinar has also been released.

Teid, real life use cases

As mentioned by Ramesh on his blog, here are two very interesting articles describing how to use Teid :

• Provision Data Virtualization on OpenShift and Connect from Teiid Designer
• Salesforce as a REST service using Data Virtualization

... and some more items

• Thomas Segismont, a RHQ developer, just released a quite interesting blog post on how to monitor MBean deployed on Wildfly / JBoss EAP 6,but also an exciting new project called Simone: a Java library for system monitoring !
• If you feel like contributing to a new project, and that Simone just mentioned above, has not raised your interest, you might be interested in the Thym project proposal from the JBoss Tools team.
• JBoss Evangelists are on tour in Europe !
  • Follow Andrew R. and Arun Gupta across the continent and catch them if you can ! They are not Pokemons, but you'll definitely learn a lot attending their talks.
• AeroGear Push updates to OpenShift and standalone servers
• As always, the JBoss universe is full of releases, including in the last two weeks:
  • Overlord DT Gov 1.2.0
  • Hibernate ORM 4.2.11
  • JBoss Forge 2.2.0 (Final)
  • PicketLink 2.6.0.CR1
  • S-RAMP 0.4.0.Final
  • Teiid Designer 8.4.0 Final Released
  • Keycloak Alpha 3 Released
  • jBPM Migration Tooling v0.13
  • RHQ 4.10 available

Decaf'

If there is something that Java people has sometimes to face with RHEL is tuning the OS layer to increase their app performances, in order to ensure that the system "does the right thing". A while back, I've blogged about tuned-adm, which is a nice way for "a non Linux expert" to configure the kernel accordingly to one's usage.

Along those lines, but in more in depth, there was a couple of interesting articles recently published on the Red Hat developer blog on performances tuning for caches and huge pages:

• Examining huge page performance
• Determining whether an application has poor cache performance

Worth mentioning also is this blog entry on COPRs, a system designed to help people make theirs RPMs easily available over the internet. Even more importantly, COPRs can build for all the system one wishes for (RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, and so on...). This is quite handy because if you package a Java app as an RPM, having it build for all those targets is a no-brainer, but still a time consuming (and boring) task. In this case, COPRs will take care of that for you - so certainly worth a look !

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

JBoss in the Wild

If you are interested in meeting with, and talking to, some of the JBoss developers then you have two fantastic opportunities coming up over the next couple of months.

The first opportunity will be during EclipseCon 2014, being held in San Francisco from March 17th to 20th.  This event sees a number of sessions being given by Red Hat employees such as Fred Bricon, Gorken Ercan, Bob Brodt and David Bosschaert.  In addition to these session there is also an opportunity to spend a full day learning about Vert.x with presentations being given by many of the leading experts, including Tim Fox.  If you are interested in any of these technologies then book your place for what promises to be a very informative  and worthwhile event.

The second opportunity will be during DevNation and Red Hat Summit, taking place in San Francisco from April 13th to 17th.  DevNation consists of numerous developer focussed presentations covering technologies such as Camel, OpenShift, AeroGear, SwitchYard, jBPM, Drools and many more.  With most of the presentations being given by the leading experts in these technologies this event provides another informative, developer focussed opportunity for learning, meeting the experts and debating any topic that may interest you.  There may even be a few beers to be had

Examining Mobile Development with Cordova

Mobile development is something that is on the radar of most developers, whether this be the development of native applications or those created using hybrid technologies such as Apache Cordova.  Another choice that we often make is whether to develop from the command line or through integrated support within an IDE; luckily we have both avenues covered.  Arun Gupta has taken some time to show how easy it is to create a Cordova application from the command line with Gorkem Ercan demonstrating similar capabilities within JBoss Tools 4.2.0 Beta 1.

Infinispan and Parallel Execution of Map/Reduce Tasks

Infinispan has long supported the fully distributed execution of both Map and Reduce phases of the tasks however the downside was that each node executed these tasks within a single thread.  With the community release of Infinispan 7.0.0.Alpha1 this has now changed as this release introduces the ability to execute these tasks in parallel.

REST versus WebSockets

Arun Gupta, while travelling the world to give his Java EE7 presentations, has many conversations with those who turn up to learn.  One of the most common questions asked during these conversations is on how REST compares to WebSockets.  Arun has recently tackled this question in a post that discusses the pros and cons of each approach, including examining the performance of each through a micro benchmark, all with the intention of providing you with sufficient information to spur discussions.

RHQ source moves to GitHub

If you are interested in, or indeed already following, the work of the RHQ team then you should be aware that they have recently moved their source code repository over to GitHub.  This move should make it easier for everyone to obtain the source and contribute changes through pull requests.

Webinars

Kris Verlaenen and Prakash Aradhya will be presenting a webinar demonstrating how quickly you can get started building powerful workflow automation solutions.  The webinar takes place on Wednesday March 12th.

The end of March brings three opportunities to join an interesting webinar discussing rules execution with a focus on how decision tables.  If you are interested in these technologies, and are available on Thursday March 27th or Friday March 28th, then register and learn.

New Releases

Brett has announced two releases from the Hibernate ORM team, Hibernate ORM 4.2.9.Final and Hibernate ORM 4.3.2.Final.  Both releases contain numerous bug fixes and have been heavily focussed on improving performance.

Thomas has announced the release of the Arquillian OSGi 2.1.0.CR12 component

Barry has announced the release of Teiid Designer 8.4 Beta1, focussing primarily on upgrading the Teiid client compatibility to include support for Teiid 8.6.

Max has announced the release of JBoss Tools 4.2.0 Alpha2, the first working alpha release that focusses on integration with Eclipse Luna.  This release comes with a host of new features including improvements for Cordova, Arquillian, BrowserSim, OpenShift and many more.

Dan has announced the release of Infinispan 7.0.0.Alpha1.  This release includes support for several new features including support for clustered listeners, the ability to execute Map/Reduce tasks on multiple threads, the building blocks of cache security and improved support for OSGi in the HotRod java client.

The Forge team have announced the release of JBoss Forge 2.1.1.Final, following quickly on the heels of their 2.1.0.Final release.  This release addresses 51 issues making this the fastest and most reliable release of all.

That's all for this week, join us again next week to discover more from the world of JBoss

Much to the enjoyment of the entire JBoss community, we're happy to make this week's headline hint to the first final release of WildFly, the premier open source Java EE7 application server (and the foundation of the future releases of JBoss EAP). The importance of this release can't be overstated, for multiple reasons: it is the first release since the JBoss AS project has been renamed (and it is a good time to remember and thank again the JBoss community for their tremendous involvement in the effort), it is state-of-the-art Java EE 7-compliant (both in the Web and Full profile), it makes use of a modern, cutting edge, highly performant, web server (Undertow), and, last but not least, it is massively cool! And you can surely learn so much more from the announcement made by the project lead, Jason Greene.

In addition to the official announcement, we strongly recommend a few other articles published this week on about WildFly 8:

• Arun Gupta has published a run-through of WildFly 8 as well as a list of introductory videos
• Matthias Westendorf's guide for installing the Aerogear UnifiedPush Server on WildFly 8

JUDCon India 2014 wrap-up

Arun Gupta has also published a comprehensive wrap-up of JUDCon India 2014 along with the feedback gathered from the participants. It was an engaging and successful conference, and if you didn't have the chance to attend, at least you can get a taste of it.

Tips and tricks for JBoss BPM

Eric Schabell has written a series of blogs posts, introducing a number of useful features of the JBoss BPM suite

• How to change your runtime session strategy
• Accessing context variables from within a rule
• Using Git+SSH for the the rules repository

Maciej Swiderski has published an article about developing reusable business assets as knowledge archives, a feature of the jBPM 6 deployment module.

In Brief

• Hibernate Search is migrating to Apache Lucene 4.6, as announced by Sanne Grinovero's post
• Heiko Rupp shows in this post how to run the RHQ agent on a Raspberry Pi
• Mark Proctor provides some early performance results of Drools 6 with the PHREAK algorithm

New releases

• Rewrite 2.0.11
• Arquillian Container Undertow 1.0.0.Alpha1
• Arquillian Container Weld 1.0.0.CR8
• Teiid Designer 8.4 Alpha 1
• JBoss Data Virtualization v6 GA (the productized version of Teiid 8.x)
• Hibernate Search 5.0.0.Alpha1

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.

There's not a lot for me to say today other than Merry Christmas! I'd like to take this opportunity to thank everyone within Red Hat/JBoss, our customers, our communities etc. for all of your support over the past year and for your continued support in 2014. I hope everyone reading this has a great festive season and if you don't celebrate Christmas then I still hope you manage to chill out, rest, or just enjoy yourself! If you do want to check out what's going on in the world of JBoss then look at the main JBoss.org blog feed, but normal service will be resumed here in the editorial in the new year!

With that I'll leave you with a festive image for this time of good cheer to everyone! Onward! (To 2014!!)

It's Friday 13th ! Beware ! It's not a time to commit, build or even code... Rather than endangering your business and software, just relax, sit down, and let us walk-through the JBoss related news of the week...

Comes and Play with EE 7

Java EE 7 is out, and it's time to learn about its new features and what to expect in Wildfly 8 ! Fortunately, Arun Gupta and Antonio Goncalves have though about that, and their presentation at Java One on this topic is now available online.

A week in the "merde"

You are wondering where to take the kids and the wife in January ? Paris, France, on the third week, might be an interesting deal for you ! Indeed, on top of the usual beauty of my birth city, Paris will host the JBoss Paris Conference that will be held on the Wednesday 22, and few days after that, on Friday, the first Ceylon Tour Paris... Voulez vous coder avec moi ? (well, I won't be there, but still...)

Discover the new features of Infinispan 6.0.0

Infinispan 6.0 has been out for a few weeks now, and if you were in London last week, you might have been part of the happy few, like me , to attend Mircea Markus talk on those new features. Luckily, the London JBUG  has just released it on YouTube.

It worth mentioning also that Infinispan 6.0 introduces the support for remote querying, allowing one to leverage its integration with Hibernate Search and Lucene, while running Infinispan in server mode. (note that this feature is also already available in JBoss Data Grid 6.2.Beta)

Byteman 2.1.4

A new minor release for Byteman, filled with bug fixes, but also an opportunity for anybody who has not yet used this fantastic tool for JVM instrumentation to give it a go... Certainly, you have some application, you would like to profile ?

Broken mirror

Your application's Web UI is not getting prettier by the minute, and it's time for a change ? It's then the perfect opportunity to checkout the newest release of both RichFaces and RichWidget !

• RichFaces 5.0.0.Alpha2- with too many features to be summarize here ;
• RichWidget 0.1 - full JavaScript !

Heroes of Continuous Delivery

The Arquillian project is certainly true to the core spirit of continuous delivery, as almost each week that passes contains, not only one, but several releases of its numerous components. Having a Friday 13Th in this week has not prevent them to do as usual, and three sub-projects have released new versions:

• Rest Extension 1.0.0.alpha2, mostly add support for JAX-RS 2.0 Client APIs
• Droidium 1.0.0.Alpha3 is also out, but has serious issues on Windows (so if you run on this system, hold it for a little while, a new release, is coming quite soon)
• The final release of the Arquillian Drone extension is also out, and if you are interested in Web UI testing automation, you should definitely look this one up !

Hibernate Search and Hibernate ORM are friends again

If last week saw the release of Hibernate ORM 4.2.8 Final, featuring many performances improvement, it also sadly broke its compatibility with Hibernate Search. This was spotted right on, and it is now fixed with the release of Hibernate Search 4.4.1.Final !

Decaf'

... And let's take a little peak outside the Java and JBoss universe, where things also moving along quite nicely:

• The release of Red Hat Enterprise Server 7 Beta is quite a milestone, and as RHEL remains, for many people, the choice of excellence to run   JBoss Middleware software on, it is bound to interest a few readers of this post...
• Last week, was also announced Openshift Enterprise 2.0 - if you do not know yet this "next generation application hosting platform developed by Red Hat", it is definitely worth taking a look !

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.