Hello JBoss Followers:

To kick of this week's note, I wish to focus on a major delivery by MANY of our teams - JBoss Developer Studio 6 shipped TODAY and you can download it immediately.   Key features include:

- Based on Eclipse Juno

- Installing JBDS into your own Eclipse Juno via Eclipse Marketplace (see screenshot below)

- Android Tools now in JBoss Central

- GWT Designer now in JBoss Central

- Improved OpenShift Wizard to support OpenShift Enterprise

- Improved Maven Project Wizard

- Support for Seam 2.3

- Tested on Windows 8 and Mac OSX 10.8 (Mountain Lion)

- Tested on Java 7 32-bit and 64-bit

The delivery of JBoss Developer Studio represents more than a simple Eclipse-based toolset due to JBoss Central.   On JBoss Central, you will find the following:

- Easy integration with OpenShift - including the new OpenShift Enterprise

- Use of Java EE 6 Maven Archetypes and JBoss Developer Framework's Stacks

- HTML5 Archetype from the Aerogear Project - which has also dramatically updated their project's website

- RichFaces Archetype from the RichFaces Project

- Spring MVC Archetype from the Snowdrop Project

- GWT Archetype from the Errai Project

- JBoss Developer Framework's Quickstarts - dozens of easy to follow examples to get you started quickly with Java EE6 and complimentary features

- Links to documentation, screencasts, blogs and much more

A significant number of open source stars have to align to deliver all of these capabilities at a single point in time.   If you are the type (like myself) who would rather spend a few minutes watching a video BEFORE you invest the time and energy into downloading and installing something - check out this video I recently uploaded to YouTube:

The JBoss Team has also delivered numerous blogs, new releases and crafted several other videos that I know you will enjoy:

• Brian Leathem describes his vision for Polygot Widgets - UI controls that are available via many frameworks like JSF, GWT and JQuery.  Check out his awesome demo video.
• Gary Brown produced two videos for Project Overlord (SOA Governance) - one on Call Trace Business Activity Monitoring and another on Policy Enforcement.
• Eric Schabell recorded a very nice demo of using SwitchYard at OpenShift.
• The Errai Team talks up their 2.2 candidate release.
• Jozef Hartinger announces Weld 2.0.0.Beta1 - the CDI 1.1 reference implementation - Java EE just gets better and better
• Ales Justin unleashes the CapeDwarf - no this is not a reference to The Hobbit, it is to make your Google App Engine projects more portable!
• Eric Schabell announces the deliver of the OpenShift Primer on Amazon and Apple's iBooks - what is the logical first comment? "What about Google Play?"  :-)
• Bryan Che publishes a great blog on defining a Hybrid Cloud - Portability - Open Source and Open Standards
• Boleslaw Dawidowicz announces GateIn 3.5.0.Final
• Ken Finnigan gives us the GateIn Cookbook - an excellent resource for getting your head into the GateIn game.

There are still a few weeks left in 2012 - I suspect our team can crank out a few more great things in that timeframe.  Stay tuned, it gets better and better

Welcome to another week in the world of JBoss.org, a quiet week as is the tradition of reflection this week. Let me explain this...

This week we again catch you up with the news in our world of JBoss. This time we do it a bit different. This is a week in North America, specifically in the United States where everyone has a short work week (four day weekend, can you imagine?!). Thanksgiving is upon us and it is not only a tradition involving big ol' turkey dinners, football (American style) on the television and gathering together with your families. It is a time to reflect on what you are thankful for in your lives.

We have much to be thankful for in the world of JBoss. Not only are we thankful for the chance to better our daily lives by working on, coding, improving, brainstorming and contributing to our projects, but we have one of the best communities in the open source world. This is not about the core JBoss editorial editing team being thankful, it is about you being a part of it all. You the contributor, you the member, you the user should all take time and be thankful for all that is possible in this community we have built together.

So kick back, grab another turkey leg and enjoy this weeks JBoss news. It is not as busy as usual, but next week we will be back in full force!

Events

Kris Verlaenen from the jBPM project has been touring the JBUGs in Sydney (November 19) and Melbourne (November 20) this week, stay tuned for more on this when he gets over his jet-lag!

The Netherlands JBug kicks off on Dec 10th with a JBoss & OpenShift evening by Eric D. Schabell.

Blogs / Articles

Mark Little give a recap of his Devoxx experiences.

Dimitris gives his take on Devoxx and it includes links to most of the existing JBoss blogging activities related to Devoxx.

Over on MasterTheBoss you can find a nice article on SwitchYard & JSF integration. Also one on how to use a Resource Adapter in your MDB (AS7 based).

We have pulled in the help of a Chinese speaking / writing Christina Lin, you can find her latest translations of JBoss content on her site, but it is also linked from the original postings by Eric Schabell and on HowToJBoss.com. Thanks Christina!

Releases

A list of new project releases, enjoy!

• Teiid 8.2 Final released.
• ModeShape 3.0.1.Final released.

Thinking of getting involved in a JBoss User Group (JBUG)?

Setting up or running a JBoss User Group? Follow @JBossNews on twitter and catch the next event online especially for you and your group.

Vote is ongoing!

Don't forget to vote for your favorite new project name for JBoss AS!

Thanks again for taking the time from your busy Thanksgiving activities to read this, we look forward to you all coming back to work on Monday ready to kick it on your favorite JBoss project(s)!

JBoss Renaming Update

At the beginning of October we announced our intention to rename JBossAS and asked the Community's help in doing so.  Our original plan had the submission period running from October 1st to October 14th, followed by a voting period running from October 21st to November 1st and finally an announcement of the winner during next week's Devoxx conference.  The response we received from the Community was fantastic, with over over 1500 names being submitted, and we are only now completing the short list of names.  This short list will be announced at next week's Devoxx conference, after which we will have a voting period taking us up to the Christmas holiday season with the announcement of the winning submission being made in early 2013.

Keep your eyes open for the announcements and remember to vote for your favourite once voting commences.

Why should you consider using a Data Grid?

Have you ever thought about why you should use a Data Grid?  Perhaps you are wondering what advantages a Data Grid will have over a Clustered Cache?  If these are questions you have been thinking about then Shane Johnson has some answers for these and more.

From Requirements to Deployed Services

The Savara project, part of the Overlord Governance umbrella project, has the aim of developing tooling to support the concept of Testable Architectures.  As part of their recent milestone release, Gary has recorded a screencast which shows how you can get from requirements to deployed services in 15 minutes.  You can find more information about the screencast and demo over at the Savara blog.

Automating ATDD through integration of Thucydides and Arquillian

The Arquillian team have come up with a plan to integrate Acceptance Test Driven Development, the definition of automated acceptance criteria, with the powerful Arquillian test framework.  The integration of Thucydides with Arquillian will create a powerful framework that will enable the automated testing of human-readable test specifications, providing an environment through which Acceptance Testing can become agile.

In order to kickstart this work they will be hacking on this idea during the free-to-attend Devoxx Hackergarten.  If you are in the area and want to get involved then head along to Hackergarten on Tuesday 13th November to take part in the fun.

JBoss AS 7 Tutorials

This week sees two great tutorials from Master The Boss. The first tutorial walks you through the JBoss AS Maven plugin, showing how it can be used to deploy artifacts, undeploy artifacts and add resources into the application server.  The second tutorial walks you through the necessary steps to enable ActiveMQ as a message broken within JBoss AS 7.

GWT and Errai UI Quickstart

If you have ever wanted to do client side HTML5 templating within GWT then this screencast from Lincoln is just what you are looking for.  Lincoln has also provided the demo code so that you can make your own modifications and play around.

Turning packages into a module system

Adam Warski has put together a thought-provoking piece on what he believes would be needed if we decided to turn packages into a module system.  This is worth a read, whether you agree with him or not, so head over and add your thoughts into the discussion.

Scaladin quickstart for Escalante

Escalante, the JBoss application server for Scala, now has its first external contribution in the form of a quickstart demonstrating how to run Scaladin, a Scala wrapper for the Vaadin Framework.  If you are interested in working with Scala in an application server environment, or have an interest in the polyglot efforts at JBoss, then take the quickstart for a spin and see what you think.

JBoss Out and About

Next week will see many of the JBoss Core and Community developers hit Devoxx to teach, learn and hack with the wider Open Source communities.  Emmanuel has written about his expectations for Devoxx; Sarah has written about all the wonderful labs, workshops and BOFs covering the testing universe, and Geoffrey gives you some ideas for hacking Drools Planner during the Hackergarten.

The Infinispan team will be in force at JUDCon China, held on the 29th and 30th November, to give nine presentations on all things Infinispan.

Eric will be at JBugNL on 12th December to give an OpenShift Primer, followed by an appearance at Red Hat Developer Day in London on 14th December to present on Advanced Java & JBoss in the Cloud and finally the Open Source Conference 2012 in Amsterdam on where he will give a talk entitled "Demystifying the path to a JBoss Intelligent, Integrated Enterprise".

Eric has also submitted three sessions to the JAX 2013 conference in Mainz, Germany being held at the end of April 2013.  The sessions are "Advanced Java & JBoss in the Cloud", "Building highly scalable process & rule-driven applications" and "JBoss BPMS sneak peak".

New Releases for the Week

This week has seen numerous releases from across the JBoss ecosystem

• The Overlord team have made two releases
  • Milestone 2 of their Business Activity Monitoring tooling, including a screencast of some of the new features
  • Savara 2.1 Milestone 2, enhancing the support for SwitchYard java service simulation.
• The Arquillian team have also made to releases
  • Arquillian Transaction Extension 1.0.0.Alpha2, extracting the JTA transaction support into a separate module
  • Arquillian Container Weld 1.0.0.CR5
• The Teiid team join the fun with another two release
  • Teiid 8.2 CR1, including support for Vaults, Google Spreadsheet and a WSDL backed webservice translator
  • Teiid Admin Web Console 1.0 CR1, a new GWT based administrative console for Teiid
• The SwitchYard team have released SwitchYard 0.6 Beta 2 and should shortly be following that with the 0.6 release.
• The tools team have released the first betas of JBoss Tools 4 and JBoss Developer Studio 6
• The Transactions team have released JBoss TS 4.17.2.Final
• The Hibernate team have released Hibernate ORM 4.1.8.Final
• The Portlet Bridge team have released Portlet Bridge 3.1.0.Final
• The Drools team have announced their first public release of UberFire, a web based workbech forming the basis of their consoles

This has been a very productive week for many teams across the JBoss Community, writing many blog posts, publishing screencasts and announcing numerous releases.  Next week promises to be just as productive, especially for all those attending Devoxx.

Join us again next week to find out what happens during Devoxx!

Well it's been another really busy week in the JBoss world! What with the usual flurry of project releases, including two Weld versions, JBossWS 4.1.0.Final, and three Arquillian releases, you could be forgiven for thinking that we wouldn't have time to do much else. Well you'd be wrong For a start, John Sanda gives a good discussion about CQL and Cassandra, and how they are relevant within RHQ. Then Shane has a great article on Data Grids and NoSQL: you should definitely check it out and there's a lot of nice diagrams to illustrate Although it's Shane's other post on "What can I use a data grid for?" has some of the best pictures I've seen in a JBoss post for a while!

Keith Babo had a couple of sessions at this year's JUDCon in Boston on Switchyard and SOA, and has written them up for his latest blog entry.

Finally there are several activities going on elsewhere that you should be interested in, especially if you want to meet the teams behind out projects. These include Devoxx where some of the Ceylon team will be giving a hands-on session, and Intellifest where you can learn more about Drools and jBPM5. OK, that's it for now!

Thirteen years ago saw the launch of the first JBoss Application Server (JBoss AS); since then the project has grown from its original goal of implementing the EJB 1.0 specification to include other enterprise technologies and all the specifications which fall under Java EE.  The current version of JBoss AS, which we call AS7, is not only an implementation of the full profile for Java EE6 but also executes with a very small and fast footprint.  It continues to innovate quickly, introducing new ideas and technologies into the JBoss mix.  But the JBoss name is no longer associated with just the application server and its community. The use of the JBoss name has expanded greatly to cover nearly 100 projects and platforms including JBoss SOA, rules management (JBoss BRMS), Portal (GateIn), IDE tooling (JBoss Developer Studio), mobile (AeroGear), big data (JBoss Data Grid), polyglot and many more.

We now believe that the time is right for making some big changes, as was officially announced earlier today and covered by Mark Little. Some of these include the decision to rename JBoss AS through an open election and also provide better access to the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform product.  We believe the decision to rename JBoss AS will not only reflect better the aim of the project and its community but also its spirit and future direction.  As with all things JBoss related, we believe that the community should play a major role in this process and, to that end, we have created an election process through which you can submit new names for the project and then vote for your favorite.

The submission period starts from today, October 1st, and will continue until October 14th.  The top suggestions will then be presented to the community from October 21st until November 1st, during which time you will be able to vote for your favorite.  The winning name will be announced during the Devoxx conference, held in Antwerp, Belgium between November 12th and November 16th.

So get your thinking caps on and submit your ideas for names.  Remember this is your choice and your voice.

Errai 2.1 is On The Way

Throughout our summertime communications blackout (sorry about that), the Errai team has been working overtime to further polish and stabilize all the great features in Errai 2.0 while also introducing a bunch of brand new features. This article outlines all the major changes between Errai 2.0 and Errai 2.1.

The future of GWT: What say you?

Are you looking to have your voice heard on the future direction of GWT as it moves beyond the 2.5 release?  The guys over at Vaadin have collaborated with other members of the GWT Steering Committee to build a survey in order to poll the GWT community, how they use GWT, what they use with GWT, and most importantly, what do they want from future GWT releases?

JBossTS team blog: XTS Whirlwind Tour

Recently the Transactions Team delivered a training course to the Red Hat support staff to help them support JBossTS. As part of the course I delivered a demo configuring XTS (our Web service Transactions implementation) and debugging common issues.

JBoss Tools: JBoss Tools 4

This year we are starting on JBoss Tools 4 (as opposed to the past seveal years of JBoss Tools 3). Why the new version? There are several reasons why it was time. Our Eclipse.org project-based target platform also changed from 3.x to 4.x. The projects is growing bigger and bigger so it's time to clean up some of the APIs and move from our big SVN semi-modularized monolithic layout to smaller, more independent (but still aligned) Git projects. The groundworks for this does require splitting with things in the past, at least on a technical level - but we do plan on making this transition as transparent as possible on the user level.

Red Hat Integration & BPM Week

We are excited by the opportunities that the recent acquisitions of FuseSource and Polymita offer our customers, partners, and Red Hat. Building on the close of these acquisitions, we are hosting a virtual conference week to communicate Red Hat’s new integration and business process management vision, strategy, road map, and technologies. Customers, prospects, partners, employees, press, analysts, and other stakeholders and interested parties are expected to join us for Red Hat Integration and BPM Week, Oct. 15-18.

Business Process Simulation in jBPM Designer

This is still an experimental feature and subject to changes, so community input and involvement is very important.  Business Process Simulation allows you to to simulate your process models, and view helpful simulation results that can guide you to improving your models as well as be able to better understand and describe them to your peers and/or customers.

AS7 Web console architecture, future directions

It’s time to revisit some of the decisions that lead to the current console architecture and implementation. We would like to outline some of the challenges that lie ahead of us and provide entry points for subsequent discussions.

Teiid tooling for the AS7 management console

Teiid is a data virtualization system that allows applications to use data from multiple, heterogenous data stores. The Teiid team is making good progress on adding the Teeid extensions to the AS7 console.

Portlet Bridge: JBoss Portlet Bridge 3.1.0.Beta1 Released

This release brings support for fileUpload in RichFaces! There is still a minor bug within RichFaces 4.2.2 that prevents it working in portlets, but it is resolved in the current 4.3 work. Check out RF-12273 for details on the fix, as it can easily be applied to 4.2.2.Final. Now all RichFaces 4.2.2.Final components are supported within non WSRP JSF portlets!

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!

A lot happened in the Summer of 2012, so much I thought it was worthy of a high-level recap.   

• JBoss Enterprise Application Platform ships and arrives at OpenShift.  Check out the many videos demonstrating how to leverage JBoss on OpenShift.
• JBoss Developer Studio 5 is born and is FREE - download now and try out Java EE 6 + HTML5 Mobile web development.

• JBoss Data Grid is born - providing enterprise-caliber support to Infinispan users.
• The BRMS product revs to 5.3 - now including support for jBPM5 - BPMN2 modeled business processes
• TicketMonster - a JBoss Developer Framework example - runs in the cloud - a video by Marius B
• The JBoss World Keynote Demonstration is open sourced - here is a short screencast/vide to give you an overview of application.
  
• Our Developer Webinar Series was restarted with Kris Verlaenen and jBPM5 leading the way

As always, the global JBoss community continues to create new code, capabilities and content.  What follows are some of the highlights that I have discovered over the last week.

Recent Blogs:

• Andrew Rubinger, published author, contributor to Arquillian and lead of the ShrinkWrap project produced a blog proposing an In-Memory File System for Java based on ShrinkWrap. 
• Geoffrey De Smet produced a great video show off continuous planning - how do you manage scheduling your workers? Or optimize deliveries? Drools Planner
• Lincoln Baxter writes about Arquillian automated testing for CDI-powered applications.
• Also related to Arquillian, Jakub Narloch announces the new Spring Framework Extension 1.0.0.Beta1
• Scott Stark, legendary JBoss core developer, is cooking up some fun stuff with running Weld on Java SE. Plus, he also proposes a solution to support CDI-based producer methods have runtime typing.
• Heiko Braun talks about our internal process for defining & designing new administrative features of JBoss Application Server and wants YOUR thoughts.
• Ray Ploski provides us with a great introduction to JBoss Forge with JRebel support
• Getting started with Hibernate & JPA2 by Lincoln Baxter
• A nice article by Aleksandar Kostadinov on using the JBoss AS7 Admin Console via an Apache httpd proxy
• Max Andersen brings us JBoss Tools on Eclipse 3.7.0 (yes, that ancient version) and makes it possible to deploy on Eclipse 4.2.0 (Juno).  And for those of you using Fedora as your development desktop - there is a little something for you as well - read the blog for more details.
• Also related to Fedora and JBoss, Marek Goldmann describes the use of OpenJPA and Hibernate3 on that combination
• Shane Johnson describes the process of migrating from community JBoss Application Server 7 to supported JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 - a real customer migration story - in 22 minutes!

Releases

• Teiid 8.1 ships and brings back "embedded"
• BoxGrinder 0.10.3 is released