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Weekly Editorial

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Being relentlessly busy over summer means that there's a lot to show for it when fall comes. Well, summer has come and gone, and there is a lot of stuff that our team would like to share with you. Download the latest releases of JBoss projects, and follow the talks delivered by JBoss team members. It's easy to find them: JBoss is everywhere.

 

At Java One: JBoss takes over

 

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JBoss sits at the forefront of enterprise Java innovation, and if you're at Java One this year, you will find a massive JBoss presence. Or, as Mark Little's post said: "maybe they should rename it as JBossOne!". Make sure that you attend the talks delivered by JBoss team members during sessions and at the JBoss booth.

 

And, for anything in the world, don't miss the "Lightning in the Cloud" party. JBossians are not just technically savvy, but also a fun bunch.

 

 

Over the web: all eyes on HTML5


One of the key aspects of today's software industry is an expanding eco-system of increasingly powerful mobile devices. HTML5 adds a number of features that developers can use for building rich, powerful web-based applications. Burr Sutter's webinar of this week synthethised these capabilities, from a unique enterprise Java-focused perspective. If you are an enterprise Java developer and you want to be up-to-date with the current developments of the industry, make sure that you watch the recoding of the webinar "HTML5 for the Java Web Developer". You'll learn a lot, I know I did.

 

In addition to that, Wesley Hales will hold a presentation on "The Mobile Web - HTML5 and mobile devices" at the Atlanta HTML5 user group on September 22nd. If you're in the area, make sure you attend.

 

Richfaces: component-oriented and mobile

 

Brian Leathem has continued his overview of the Richfaces CDK with an Input component - paving the way for a a more complex discussion on wrapping existing JavaScript components, such a jQuery UI component. Stay tuned.

 

Also, Wesley Hales has started a series of blog posts addressing on using Richfaces with mobile applications. Follow it for interesting technical details and tips.

 

On the (data) grid: a new Infinispan release, and how to take advantage of CDI and Ruby

 

Infinispan continues to move forward by releasing 5.1.0.Alpha2 this week, containing features that address particular areas such as push state transfer. Read more about it in the release announcement.

 

Integrating Infinispan with the rest of your application is much easier if it can be done through a generic, universally-understood programming model. Well, in Java EE there is a common idiom, and everyone speaks it - CDI, so it is only natural for Infinispan to support it. Kevin Pollet's blog entry describes the Infinispan-CDI integration module in detail, providing detailed examples on its usage, as well as about other features such as support for JCache annotations.

 

Another interesting example of using Infinispan comes from Lance Ball who shared the code and slides from his StrangeLoop presentation - using the DataMapper Ruby ORM over Infinispan with TorqueBox. More than just being a cool showcase, it illustrates perfectly the strength of the TorqueBox model. Ruby developers can take advantage of their favourite language and frameworks, on top of powerful Java EE middleware. Bring your apps to us, we'll treat them right!

 

A new JBoss AS7 release

 

A steady stream of releases ensures that new features and bug fixes are promptly delivered to users, and that is especially true for JBoss AS7. JBoss AS 7.0.2.Final "Arc" includes new features such as support for JSF 2.1, asynchronous EJBs, SSO and many other resolved issues. Get the best out of our favourite platform, keep your application server up-to-date!

 

Arquillian, not just for servers

 

If you are familiar with Arquillian, you should know by now how to use it for testing server-side code. But Karel Piwko will show you another way of using Arquillian - through its Arquillian Drone extension you can test the web UI as well, thus making sure that you also provide functional tests for your application.

 

Upcoming: spatial queries in Hibernate Search

 

Nicholas Helleringer, one of our JBoss community members, has created a spatial query integration module for Hibernate Search and has blogged about it here!

 

JBoss sightings

 

Besides the already mentioned topics, last week we had:

 

  • A lot of interesting topics and a list of participants including several JBoss team and community members at OpenBlend in Ljubljana.
  • A demo-packed JBoss BOF at the Toronto JUG with the participation of several JBoss teams.
  • The September issue of JAXenter's Java Tech Journal is completely dedicated to JBoss AS7 and OpenShift: make sure you grab it, it's free.

 

And don't forget about:

 

 

Is that all? Obviously not. In the JBoss community there is always something going on. Come back next week to find out more.

JBoss Everywhere - geographically speaking

I suspect many folks see "JBUG" and determine that must be tied to a jira or bugzilla entry. Well that is not the case, JBUG stands for JBoss User Group and they are popping up around the globe.  Recent startups are Neuchatel over in Switzerland, Washington DC and Milan, Italy. As well as many other speaking events. Look for the JBoss team at JavaOne, Devoxx and all your favorite developer conferences.

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TorqueBox Everywhere

The TorqueBox core team and community are showing up everywhere.  Most JBoss'ers are frequent flyers - always participating in local community meetings around the world but the TorqueBox team sets a high standard.

 

Have you seen TorqueBox in the cloud with OpenShift?

Or TorqueBox in Brazil?

Or TorqueBox at the Ruby Hoedown?

Or TorqueBox in Ljubljana, Slovenija...or coming to London

Bring us your Ruby on Rails friends and give TorqueBox a try and check out configuring with Ruby instead of YAML.

 

 

JBoss invades Toronto Island

Big things happening in Toronto this week, the jboss.org developer framework teams (Seam, RichFaces, Errai, Snowdrop, Forge, Arquillian) along with their QA and Support teams are meeting on Toronto Island at Artscape Gibraltar Point.  A true retreat in every sense of the word, to plan for the next generation of JBoss sponsored developer facing framework & tools.   The energy and innovative thinking have been fantastic.  I cannot yet describe any of these ideas as they will be communicated at the appropriate time but let's just say the future looks bright.   And this from making a bunch of software engineers share air mattresses and a common washroom!

 

JUDCon London Agenda

JUDCon London is October 31st through November 1st and the agenda is now posted.

This is a great opportunity to spend time with members of the core JBoss engineering team representing AS (Application Server), jBPM, Drools, Infinispan, Arquillian and Hibernate.

 

And JBoss online via jboss.org/webinars

Scott Stark & Tobias Kunze gave a demo-filled live session on September 7th.  If you are interested in seeing JBoss "in the cloud" as a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) via OpenShift, please check out the recording (http://vimeo.com/28828146).  This is a great session to get the overview of both OpenShift Express and OpenShift Flex - all JBoss, focused on Java EE 6, ready to go, try it today.

The next JBoss Developer Webinar is on HTML5, make sure to register soon for a space in this session (www.jboss.org/webinars).

 

RichFaces CDK Hello World

RichFaces 4, a AJAX/RIA component set for JSF 2, includes a Component Development Kit - CDK, that you can use to create new, extend existing or wrap 3rd party UI controls/widgets/components.  This is a tool that can be used by the Java EE developers who wish to create their own custom components to be reused in their own projects.   Brian has not been here to long but as a long time community member he has hit the ground running.

 

JBoss Grows

The JBoss core team is always growing and we normally just forget to publicly call out those individuals who have join the open source movement.   That is a short coming on our part as open source is all about the community and the community is all about the individuals who give back to that community. I also welcome Jonathan Fuerth to the JBoss team.  We expect great things out of the Toronto-based Errai team!


Errai was a key element in our keynote demo (http://vimeo.com/25258416), enabling the normally server-side CDI custom eventing capability to reach the browser - real-time push - it is the future. 

 

JGroups Pub-Sub with Bela Ban

JGroups is a key element of JBoss, it is the underlying layer that makes clustering and technologies like Infinispan (distributed data grid & cache) possible.  Bela published a great post on how to use a publish and subscribe pattern with JGroups. 

 

And if you enjoy JSF, check out Stan's contributions to JSFUnit (Thanks Stan).

 

And JBoss' Hibernate 4 keeps on coming (Thanks Steve).

 

One reason I enjoy working on these blog posts is because it gives me a couple of hours to reflect on all the significant contributions that JBoss team members make consistently, whether those be code, in-person events (e.g. JUDCons, JUGs, JBugs) or virtual live & on-demand education (webinars, vimeo.com/jbossdeveloper).  It is easy to get caught up, heads down, pounding on the next deliverable.  Stopping for a moment to watch the magic happen is good for the soul.  Go Team!

 


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Another week and another update about the wonderful world of JBoss, a community that is gaining both momentum and more traction every day. Each week we try to bring you an overview of the latest, greatest JBoss project news, keeping you up to speed on the width and breadth of the innovation being done in our house.

 

Published

The Practical RichFaces book was published this week! The book is completely dedicated to development with latest RichFaces 4 release and that means that it's all based on the new JavaServer Faces 2.

 

OpenShift

There was a new release of OpenShift Express this week. For JBoss developers they have added a modules directory to the Git repo so users can easily add their own JBoss modules. Also there have been some busy beavers over in the TorqueBox team, making it available on OpenShift!

 

Switchyard

Release v0.2 was pushed out by Keith Babo this week, good job here and it's worth looking at this next generation JBoss ESB project. A quote from Keith on the release, "We are pretty jazzed about how easy it is to use CDI for both implementing services and mixing integration glue logic into Camel routes. The two use cases are quite distinct, but the developer gets the same easy-peasy, standard programming model for both. The tooling that we have written in this area generates SCA component definitions off of the CDI bean services that the user has created. This is currently implemented as a Maven plugin. We also use the Forge tooling support from JBoss Tools. Works like a charm."

 

Hibernate Core

Release v4.0.0.CR2 of Hibernate Core was announced by Strong Liu.

 

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Drools & jBPM

Michael Anstis posted a story about the new Guvnor wizzard framework, a nice improvement for Guvnor!

 

Kris Verlaenen will be hosting a set of workshops in September on jBPM5, in Japan and Australia. These workshops are a combination of presentations highlighting the various features, combined with practical sessions where you can try it out yourself using simple exercises on your own laptop.

 

Finally, the jBPM Migration project has been integrated into the Drools / jBPM github set of official projects. This was proceeded by the release of jBPM Migration v0.9, so come on over and join in to help us get everyone migrated to jBPM5!

 

JBoss AS 7

Andy Taylor provided a quick tutorial on how to get started deploying JMS resources and MDB's using HornetQ. Over on DZone, community member Daniel Bevenius has written a migration guide covering several of the possible pitfalls when migrating ejb applications to JBoss 7.

 

JBoss events

Not only do we have events coming up, but there is lots of news about who is speaking where and about what topics:

 

Showcase

This section is a weekly spotlight on one or two pretty cool items out there in the JBoss community, just to let you know what you might be missing in the shadows.

  • over on the blog by Stuart Douglas there is a nice tip for merging Git pull requests in large quantities.
  • Bela Ban has a very in depth look at Optimizations for large clusters that you don't want to miss. All of this can be found in the JGroups release v3.0.0.CR1.
  • over on twitter we had an anniversary for @kabirkhan, so give him a shout out for 7 years (and counting) at JBoss / Red Hat! ;-)
  • community member bpmn2 has a great blog full of jBPM tips and examples. Check this stuff out if you are just getting started with jBPM!
  • if you want to track conferences, speakers and you twitter contacts activities, check out a great tool / site at Lanyrd.com.

 

For the rest of you out there, enjoy your week and code on! ;-)

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:

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  • 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!

news.jpegIn the past week, the JBoss Community has been as relentless as ever - we had new releases, blogs, talks and webinars. So, here are the main headlines.

 

Even better data integration: Teiid 7.5 released

 

Data is an asset of critical importance in business computing, and can be stored in various formats and physical representations. Modern business applications reuse and integrate existing data, and using a diverse set of physical sources can be a particularly daunting task. But you can make it much simpler by using Teiid, an open-source data virtualization system that uses abstraction and federation for integrating and querying multiple such sources of data in real-time, without the need for a data migration process. If you work on an enterprise integration project, make sure you check it out. Version 7.5 has been released this week, and it adds a whole bunch of new features and stability fixes.

 

Hidden gems of JBoss AS 7.0.1

 

We mentioned the release of JBossAS 7.0.1 "Zap" in our previous editorial. Since then, JBoss AS team members have blogged about some very cool features that are included in the release, which show why JBossAS 7 is not only powerful but also extremely flexible and developer-friendly.

 

  • JPA providers à la carte (and you may not even need a database): JBoss AS 7 has great JPA support through Hibernate 4 and JBoss AS 7.0.1 adds the option of choosing another provider when deploying an application allowing developers to finely tune the server to their needs and smoothen the migration process. Scott Marlow explains this in detail, showing how to use a different provider, such as Hibernate 3.5+. And if you wish to use a datagrid like Infinispan to conquer the limitations of relational databases, yet still use a classic JavaEE application model, look no further - Scott's post will also show you how to use Hibernate OGM as a JPA provider as well.
  • Deploying a datasource with the JBoss Maven plugin: If you are a Maven user, you need to check the JBoss AS7 plugin - it provides support for deploying/redeploying and undeploying your applications, increasing the degree of automation of your build process. But not just that - it can also help setting up the server by creating datasources, as shown in this post by Stuart Douglas. When the infrastructure is also created by the build process, the setup is even easier.

 

Meanwhile, in the cloud ...

 

JBossAS7 has been available in OpenShift for two weeks, and demos and blogs continue to explore its various features. Jaikiran Pai has written an extensive and detailed blog entry about deploying Java EE 6 applications in OpenShift Express with JBoss AS7. A must read and a welcome complement to our series of videos. While Express has taken the main stage in the past few weeks, it is worth noting that OpenShift also provides the more powerful Flex option, which allows you to run applications on your own cloud servers. If you want to learn how to use OpenShift Flex for running Java EE 6 applications, check Pete Muir's latest recorded webcast.

 

See Arquillian at work


Do you write good code? Show it! No feature is truly complete without the tests that prove that it is truly so. You think it is too hard? The Arquillian project aims to make it easy, whether you want to run tests locally or in a remote container. In fact, because JBoss AS7 is so amazingly fast, testing in a container (embedded or remote) has never been easier - and you can be confident that your production code will be ok, since you ran the tests in the actual environment (or one which functionally similar to it). If you want to learn more about it, you can watch Andrew Rubinger's webinar from last week.

 

Errai 1.3: almost done

 

If you are a GWT developer, you need to check Errai, a GWT-based rich web application framework which provides a simple and efficient programming model which includes CDI support and an asynchronous communication model between the server and the client (browser), including support for pushing messages - and many other features. The team has announced the first candidate release for Errai 1.3 this week, which is the start of the final stretch before its completion. Also, if you happen to be in Ottawa, you can listen Mike Brock talk about it at the SummerCamp in Ottawa on the 27th of August.

 

STOMP-over-WebSockets in TorqueBox

 

The TorqueBox project has recently added support for STOMP-over-WebSockets, offering a browser-push based solution for Ruby applications. Bob McWhirter has published a series of posts about it, including a demo chat application. Make sure that you check it out. And if you're at the Ruby Hoedown in Nashville, TN - make sure that you go and see Lance Ball talk about TorqueBox.

 

From JUGs and JBUGs

 

Amongst the events of interest in the following weeks:

 

This is all ...


This was all for this week, enjoy the last weeks of summer - and come back next week for more news. 

Summer 2011 has been a crazy productive period for the JBoss team.  This past 7 days have been no exception as the team continues to deliver new capabilities that not only continue to close the gap with closed source offerings but go well beyond. 

 

JBoss ESB Beginner's Guide coming soon from Packt

 

JBoss ESB is a project very near and dear to my heart.  When the initial team was formed to tackle this very interesting space, they worked hard to create an ESB that t is the synergistic blend of the best of JBoss' many well known innovations - things like hot deployment of the Application Server, the declarative process flow of jBPM and the declarative business rule engine of Drools. 

 

And now there will be a book published by Packt, written by some of the key guys working on the project today - Len DiMaggio, Kevin Conner, Magesh Kumar Bojan and Tom Cunningham.  Congratuations Team!

 

If you would like an almost concise overview of the capabilities of the JBoss ESB and its supported enterprise version - JBoss SOA Platform check out this demo that I recorded eons ago. 

 

RichFaces 4.1.0.M1 Released!

 

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Many new and interesting features and fixes coming from the RichFaces team with their M1 - milestone 1 release of 4.1. 

 

RichFaces 4 is focused on JSF 2.0 and 4.1 M1 adds to the 4.0 release a new Editor (see above), Pick List, Ordering List and a Notify component - make sure to check out the live RichFaces Showcase and details in thehttp://planet.jboss.org/view/post.seam?post=richfaces_4_1_0_m1_release_announcementannouncement.

 

One of the most notable achievements of the 4.1 M1 release is the contribution by Bernard Labno - a community member who created the Notify component - many thanks Bernard!

 

Hibernate Search 4 is Coming

 

Many have seen the release of Hibernate 4.0.0.CR1 and immediately asked "where is Search?" - well great news for the Hibernate community - Sanne Grinovero (our Matrix-like operator guy for the keynote demo) has just announced their plans for Search.    I have always been a fan of Hibernate Search as many years ago I have made attempts at "word indexing" various RDBMSs - now you can easily bring the power of "google" to your relational database records.

 

jBPM5 on AS7

 

jBPM continues to be one of the most popular JBoss projects - it is a perfect example of how open source continues to move "upstack" - beyond middleware for programmers to capabilities that enable the business.  If you have historically thought of us as those App Server and Hibernate guys and have not checked out jBPM5, then you owe to yourself and your next project to review it.  And now it is running on JBossAS7.

 

Infinispan on AS7

 

Data grids are a key growth area in today's IT industry.  The relational database "bottleneck" with its typical high cost of both hardware and software licenses continues to hamper the creativity of many software & solution architects.  You no longer have to architect your way around an exorbitant license cost problem, nor the performance chokepoints. Infinispan is that next generation of middleware - we demonstrated it with floating balls and it is a key aspect of JBossAS7.

 

 

 

JCA Infow with AS7

 

Jesper Pedersen published a nice blog related to Info JCA Infow and the new AS 7.0.1 - JCA is one of the critical pieces to building robust middleware, for the end-user developer of Java EE6 middleware you might only see a few simple annotations - because these guys do the heavy lifting.

 

 

Delivery of both AS7 and AS6

 

JBossAS 7.0.1 aka "Zap" adds some big items like support for MDBs, better JPA integration and ability to pick your own JSF implementation and many, many bug fixes.  

 

JBossAS 6.1.0 addresses dozens of bugs as well as new features like enabling Javassist usage in Weld.  Not everybody has yet had a chance to migrate to AS7 and this release brings value to the many users of AS6. 

 

And just in case you were on vacation last week (around August 10th) and hopefully enjoying some unplugged time - then you might have missed the major announcement of AS7 at OpenShift, bringing EE6 to all, free, in the cloud. 

 

Pete Muir has delivered an absolutely fantastic summary and series of videos to help you ramp up - don't let the Gollum scare you.  :-)

 

Last tip of this posting...

 

Make sure to bookmark the AS7 launch page at http://www.jboss.org/as7.html and AS7+OpenShift launch page at http://www.jboss.org/openshift.html as we will continue to roll out new articles and new videos going forward.

 

And if you have a few spare weeks, you might be able to watch all of the great video content that we have hosted at Vimeo - www.vimeo.com/jbossdeveloper.

At this time of year things traditionally slow down in the Northern Hemisphere; folks finish up their tasks and leave for their Summer vacation, have fun and recharge their batteries.  Traditionally, that is, until you consider JBoss and its Community.

 

JBoss AS 7 and Openshift

 

Less than a month ago we released JBoss AS 7 (#JBossAS7), the latest incarnation of our application server, but we didn't stop there.  Taking advantage of its blazingly fast startup time (less than 3 seconds), and its exceptionally small memory footprint, we have worked hard, alongside the OpenShift team, to support AS7 Platform as a Service (PaaS) deployments in the cloud.

 

The availability of AS7 in the cloud, running on OpenShift Express and OpenShift Flex, was announced by Dr. Mark Little in his blog post, "JBossAS 7.0 comes to OpenShift!"

 

This sounds interesting, right?  You want to know more about it?  Head over to the AS7 + OpenShift page for more information.  You will find lots there, including links to the following posts.

 

 

Perhaps you want to see this in action?   Why not take a look at the following demos and see how easy, and quickly, you can create Java EE6 deployments in the cloud.

 

 

Or attend the JBoss Platform as a Service Webinar on September 7th 2011, presented by Scott Stark and Tobias Kunze.

 

Remember to check back regularly as more posts and videos are planned.

 

Ceylon

 

Work on Ceylon is still continuing at speed, with Gavin writing another good post on Unary Types and covariance.  Lots of good discussion in the comments.

 

New Releases

 

Need something to do while on vacation?  Want some new toys to play with?  Why not take a look at some of the new releases coming from JBoss?  Two major releases come from the Infinispan and TorqueBox communities, check out

 

 

and not forgetting the Hibernate Core, ModeShape and Drools communities which have all anounced their next beta releases

 

 

JBoss Events

 

The Newcastle JBug held an AS7 Hackathon this week, a hands on event exploring AS7 and how to deploy applications.  The London JBug will be hosting a similar event (JBoss AS 7 Hack-a-thon) on August 30th.

 

The Seam 3 team are hosting an online Hack Night in their IRC channel (#seam-dev), 2200 UTC on August 11th.

 

That's all for this week, enjoy your Summer vacation.

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Another week and another update about the wonderful world of JBoss, a community that is absolutely bubbling with activity. Every week we try to bring you an overview of the latest, greatest JBoss project news, keeping you up to speed on the width and breadth of the innovation being done in our house.

 

JBoss AS 7

As of late there has been lots of noise and activity around the announcements of JBoss AS 7. This continues with another behind the scenes look at Why is JBoss AS 7 so fast?

 

Ceylon

Gaven King has unleashed another insightful post to update us on Ceylon's progress, which led to a bit of a discussion that you might find interesting in the comments below the article. This brought us the follow-up article that answers some of the questions regarding the design of Ceylon. There was also a nice overview of Modules in Ceylon. It remains a very interesting and hot topic both inside the JBoss communities and in the Java community as a whole.

 

Drools / jBPM

Michael Anstis posted a few of the changes to Guvnor's Asset Viewer. Mark Proctor will be at Rule Fest 2011 in October a premier Rules conferences of the year. Also of note, Mario Fusco joins the Drools team as a core engine developer.

 

JBoss events

Events coming to the area near you that have been getting a lot of Twitter attention are the following:

 

 

Showcase

I thought it might be nice to put the spotlight on one or two of what I think are pretty cool projects out there in the JBoss community, just to let you know what you might be missing in the shadows. These are not mainstream components, but are small efforts to provide you with some ease in your daily JBoss development life. Take the time to stop by their corner of the world, read about their efforts and maybe give a helping hand!

 

 

Easy listening for your summer vacations

Looking for something a little different to listen to during your vacation? How about the JBoss Asylum podcasts, you can catch up on all the news in the JBoss community while sitting in the sun. Another good one to catch is over on This America Life entitled When Patents Attack.

 

For the rest of you out there, enjoy your summer vacations and code on (at the beach?) like these guys!

v2xk.jpg   ik82.jpg

A lot of interesting things happened since last week. Let us do a quick roundup:

 

  • We knew that HornetQ was fast, but now it's faster than ever: the HornetQ team has published a blog entry about the record performance of HornetQ: a whopping 8 million messages per second, against the industry-standard SpecJMS2007 benchmark. The best news? While the tests have been executed against JBoss EAP 5.1.2, HornetQ is powering JBoss AS7 as well - so look forward to the same great performance there.
  • If you plan to migrate an existing Seam 2 project to AS7,  you should check Marek Novotny's blog post. You can see how older applications can also benefit of the goodness of AS7, with minimal changes.
  • For Richfaces users: Lukas Fryc has posted an excellent overview of two examples of using Richfaces with JBoss AS7. And actually more: if you read it closely, you will also learn how to create JMS queues using the CLI and also through your application's code.
  • JBoss AS7 also a great runtime for OSGi bundles, which was the main focus of an excellent webinar by Thomas Diesler and David Bosschaert. If you are interested, in it, but missed it - you can always watch the recording of the demo.
  • The JBoss Asylum has a new podcast. This time, the guests are Mark Proctor and Michael Anstis. The main topic is Drools with its new 5.2 release, but the recent developments in the Java EE world got their share of attention too.
  • It's busy times for TorqueBox - and members of the team and community spread the word about it in a variety of places. And if you want to hear about it yourself, you can listen to Bob McWhirther's interview, explaining how Torquebox allows you to love Ruby on Rails and get the performance of Java EE.
  • Gavin King continues to expand his preview on Ceylon with new articles, about the current progress, and the reasoning behind some design decisions such as the ellimination of the do-while loop as well as the handling of sequences and sequenced parameters.
  • A few new releases have come out this week:
    • Manik Surtani announces Infinispan 5.0.CR8 - and now, for the final release
    • Gail Badner and Steve Eversole announce two new versions of Hibernate. Hibernate 3 has gotten a new maintenance release in 3.6.6.Final, while Hibernate 4 moves one step further towards a final release, with 4.0.0.Beta4.
  • Participating in you local JBUG is a great way to keep track of the latest developments and get in touch with the comunity and JBoss developers.  So, what happened close to you? Last week:
    • The Sydney JBUG has received an introduction on AS7 by Stuart Douglas
    • The Japan JBUG has announced an upcoming talk on AS7 next week

jbossas7_fast.png

JBoss AS7 goes Final on July 12th 2011 - You will love JBoss AS7

 

I fully expect a global drop in coffee consumption for enterprise Java developers and administrators because there will be less wait time, less coding and you now have a vastly easier to manage & deploy application server.    More developer/administrator productivity means more time spent on adding business value.   You can join the #JBossAS7 conversation on theserverside.com.

 

  • Faster startup (< 3 secs) and faster hot deployment means less time waiting to see your changes live.
  • Smaller ASs - memory footprint means more memory available for the hungry Eclipse on your desktop workstation. If you are like many JBoss users, you likely need to start dozens if not hundreds of application server instances in your production environment to meet your ever growing end-user demand.
  • EE6 programming model means a POJO with annotations model for transactional components, RESTful endpoints and the glue code between the UI tier & middle tier disappears.
  • CLI - command line interface, forget Twiddle, the new CLI can be used to touch anything available for tuning and configuration inside the application server. Other administration & management interfaces include a new Web console (based on GWT), a native Java API and a HTTP API that supports JSON payloads (yes, build your own JavaScript-based admin solution).

 

Make sure to check out the articles listing for more details about JBoss AS7.

 

  • Hibernate Users: Hibernate continues to be one of the most popular and pervasive open source projects around the globe.  Hibernate 4 ships as part of JBoss AS7 and Team Hibernate/JPA put together a nice article on what is new and now available. 
  • Spring Users: if you are a Spring user and wish to learn more about how to bring those old Spring applications to AS7 then make sure to follow Marius's blog on the topic.
  • Switchyard Users: If you need routing, transformation, Camel's declarative EIP capabilities and other SOA-oriented functionality then check out Switchyard's move to the JBoss AS7 architecture.

 

VIdeo killed the radio star and the amount of video production by the JBoss team has exploded over the last few months at www.vimeo.com/jbossdeveloper.

 

Key videos published in the last couple of weeks include:

 

Wish to follow the twitterverse action for #JBossAS7 but without actually having a Twitter account?  Check out our JSF2 + RichFaces4 based Tweetstream demonstration that runs on OpenShift at bit.ly/tweetstream2

android_tweetstream2_july_14_2011.png

  • jBPM BPMN2 Web Designer: I am personally a fan of all things "declarative", specifically when it comes to BPM or workflow.  The jBPM & Drools teams continue to demonstrate how open source will change the very nature of IT AND business.  Hyperbole on my part?  Check out Develop Complex jBPM Processes in Guvnor - design BPMN 2.0 processes, graphically, right in your browser by Tihomir. 
    Guvnor_BPMN2_Designer2.png
    Make sure to watch his HD video - seeing is believing. http://vimeo.com/26126678
  • In addition, Marian Buenosayres has been blogging about a new jBPM Form Builder.  This is an absolutely fantastic addition to jBPM project.  Many thanks Marian for getting this moving, thousands of jBPM fans look forward to future jBPM Form Builder blogs, screenshots and hopefully a video in the future. :-)
  • The White Rabbit (JBoss AS7 CR1) has been spotted - some fantastic content has trickled out related to the new AS7 - if you only have a few moments to start your learning of how to get started with AS7, I suggest watching this demonstration video captured from the Jason Greene Webinar.  There is a LOT more coming, make sure to follow @jbossdeveloper and watch for hashtag #JBossAS7 in the twitterverse.
  • IronJacamar 1.0.0 Released!  Our implementation of Java Connector Architecture - easier development via annotated POJO-based services, including a fast embedded environment to allow for fast turnaround automated testing.   I will not even attempt to repeat all the major enhancements listed in the blog post - go read it.
  • Did you know that a web profile focused application server like JBoss AS 7.0 (again, more to come on this topic soon) still has some more advanced features like JMS and JAX-WS?  Alessio of the JBossWS team published a small article on using JAX-WS with AS7.
  • Finally, GWT (Google Web Toolkit) is widely used here at JBoss, if you watch Tiho's jBPM BPMN2 Designer video then you will get to see one the showcase examples in action - Drools Guvnor.    Another example is the JBoss AS7 Admin Console (thank Heiko!) and it can be seen in Brian Stansberry's Webinar. Fast forward to minute 40 for a quick demo of the new admin console.  GWT is also being used by our RHQ team and Mazz has had some nice tips on best practices with GWT. 
    http://planet.jboss.org/view/post.seam?post=telling_gwt_to_ignore_certain_classes
    http://planet.jboss.org/view/post.seam?post=detaching_hibernate_objects_to_pass_to_gwt

We're slightly later with this week's edition, but a lot of that's to do with the time we spent at JAXConf (where we won the award for the most innovative Java company!) and all of the work we've been putting into the upcoming JBossAS 7 release! But no more delay, so let's get on with it:

 

  • As usual the Infinispan team have been hitting the ball out of the park, including some significant performance improvements where transactions are concerned (who knew that Synchronizations could be used instead of an XAResource - well, everyone in the JBossTS team of course!) Mircea reports between 20% and 40% improvement in performance, which is pretty good. Mircea's been very busy too, having just been to Jazoon to give yet another Infinispan talk. And Manik also managed to drive the team to another release candidate for the 5.0 version of Infinispan! And talking about transactions, Mark (yes, that's me) finally got round to talking about the Software Transactional Memory work that has been going on for a while, using the TXOJ framework that's part of JBossTS. Hey, as editor I'm allowed a little judicious self-focus once in a while
  • The BoxGrinder team ground out another release (OK, pardon the pun!) with 0.9.3, as reported by Marc Savy. Lots of nice improvements in this release, including a number of bug fixes. Expect to see and hear a lot more from the team as we move further into the Cloud with JBoss.
  • Dimitris wrote up a piece of the first release candidate for JBossAS 7,  called White Rabbit, (hopefully named after the Wonderland version and not the song!) As he says, the 7.0 release will be based around the Java EE 6 Web Profile, with some additions like JCA and JAX-RS, with the 7.1 release being the full EE6 profile. Of course once we had the White Rabbit release of JBossAS 7, hot on the heels of that Max announced the release of JBoss Tools 3.3 M2 (should've been called the Alice release if you ask me!) The focus is on JBossAS 7 and EE6, with more pronounced use of technologies such as JAX-RS and improved support for CDI with more complete support for Seam Solder. In fact this week has seen a lot of activity around JBossAS 7, with Kabir blogging on how to get started with CR1 in a matter of minutes (look out for more articles like this over the coming days and weeks). There's a lot to read in the article, but one sentence stands out: "JBoss Application Server 7.0.0 started in 2750ms". Not bad!
  • Another project that's been hitting its stride lately is the SwitchYard team. This week Tom has been talking about the integration of CDI Services and JAXB annotations, to automatically transform between JAXB types and XML namespaces. Definitely worth a look, since SwitchYard is our next generation ESB and we'll be hearing more from the team soon around Cloud too. Not to be outdone, David Ward introduces us to a critical component of any ESB or SOA infrastructure: the BPM (or workflow) capabilities. As David shows, and as is illustrated below, the team have been working to integrate jBPM 5 with the ESB. The combination of BPM and SOA is critical to many integration scenarios, so this is a major milestone! Kris, the jBPM lead, agrees.

http://community.jboss.org/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/102-16967-7-16616/helpdesk.png

  • We've seen and heard a lot about the future of JBoss middleware, including the keynote and JBossEverywhere. But it seems that for some people it was still a bit too abstract or vague. So we saw some significant improvements in that message this week, with a two part article called Taking a Stand! Part one is really laying the ground for the message, by looking at some statements that have been made by others (out competitors) in their attempts to place a stake in the ground for the future of Java and middleware. But as pointed out, none of them are really seeing the bigger picture, which is neither Cloud nor mobile, but a combination of the two and so much more: ubiquitous computing! Which leads us neatly to the second article, where the need for Enterprise Ubiquitous Computing is stated along with what you can expect from Red Hat/JBoss in this space. Since the combined articles are about 75K in size, don't expect us to summarise them more here

 

Well that's it for this week. Of course there were many other things going on in the wonderful world of JBoss, but we have to keep these things short and snappy. But hopefully this will whet your appetite and you'll check out all of the syndicated blogs we have and other news that happens on JBoss.org. So until next time ... enjoy!

There are so many interesting happenings in the world of JBoss that it is even hard for us "insiders" to keep up.  I personally subscribe to the Aggregated Feed [1] viewed using Flipboard on my iPad and use Twitter [2] via my Android Phone to aid in monitoring the JBoss universe.  And if you are more of an email-based person, make sure to subscribe to the JBoss Developer Newsletter list [3].  All of these tools can help keep up on news while on the bus or even in the "library" (thank you WC Fields).

 

[1] http://planet.jboss.org/home.seam

[2] http://www.jboss.org/stayingconnected.html and http://twitter.com/#!/jbossdeveloper

[3] https://engage.redhat.com/forms/businessnews

 

Here are some of the most interesting things that I noticed coming over the wire this past week.

 

  • JBoss AS7 Coming Soon!  The next generation of the JBoss Application Server is about to happen - we have several live training sessions scheduled for June 29 through July 1st.  Hear about JBoss AS7 and EE6 from the experts - the guys behind the code and driving the specs.

 

  • Keynote Presentation & Demo Videos Published - We will be very hard pressed to top the killer live demonstration at JBoss World 2011 at future events.  We included several servers (make sure to watch the whole demo), Android and iOS mobile devices, incorporated a live Twitter feed (means Internet & WIFI had to work) and required the audience to jam in hundreds of tweets while we were working the magic onstage.  We were able to perform stream analysis (Drools Fusion) on a live Twitter feed, while loading the stream into a in-memory datagrid (Infinispan) and using Hibernate OGM (more below) to drive multiple HTML5-focused mobile web-friendly applications built with jQuery, RichFaces4 + JSF2 and GWT+Errai.  Several blogs have been posted to describe the various backend technologies and in the video you get to SEE middleware - a datagrid, in action.

 

http://www.jboss.org/jbw2011keynote.html

http://www.vimeo.com/25258416

All_UIs_Mobile3.png

 

  • Hibernate OGM is Born - Hibernate is one of the most popular JBoss projects and it continues to drive real innovations in data persistence. OGM stands for Object Grid Mapping and provides a JPA engine for NoSQL datastores.  Incredibly fast persistence directly into an in-memory datagrid like Infinispan but with a familiar programming model (Hibernate/JPA). 

 

http://in.relation.to/Bloggers/HibernateOGMBirthAnnouncement

 

 

  • Drools Planner Webinar - We had a fantastic turn out for Geoffrey De Smet's Drools Planner session, here is the recording if you missed live event - http://www.vimeo.com/25236095  Geoffrey made into Argentina while skirting a Chilean Volcano with zero minutes to spare but still delivered a great live presentation.  More archived sessions are described at jboss.org/webinars

 

 

  • SwitchYard 0.1 Released - Switchyard is a whole new approach to integration-focused middleware - a new form of Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). Take a few moments to review the Getting Started and User Guides to see what I mean.  Like JBoss AS7, this represents another leap forward for open source and for anyone with an integration challenge.

 

http://planet.jboss.org/view/post.seam?post=switchyard_0_1_released

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!

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