If you're interested in learning a bit more about the foundation for our runtime governance support in SwitchYard, check out this video:

https://vimeo.com/39697265

This is the first video we've recorded in 1920x1200, so please let us know if there's an issue with the resolution.  As always, viewing the HD version of the video is recommended.

We took a little extra time with this one, but it was worth it.  A primary theme of 0.4 was how the ESB can be used in the context of governance, at design-time and runtime.  We're really happy with the progress we've made there and we're just getting warmed up.  In total, there were 105 JIRAs resolved in 0.4, so there's plenty in there beyond governance as well.  The juicy details can be found in the SwitchYard 0.4 Release Overview, which contains a list of all the new features with pointers to examples and documentation on each.

We have a sizeable backlog of videos we've been planning on everything from getting stuff installed, to feature profiles, to exploration of the more obscure aspects of the project.  So stay tuned and let us know what you think!

Cheers,

The SwitchYard Team

Just got back home from JUDCon India 2012 and all I can say is "Wow!".  Magesh and I gave a talk on SwitchYard and I also had a chance to participate in the developer panel at the end of day 1.  The entire trip was a fantastic experience, albeit a bit short.  I just checked and I spent about 49 hours traveling to and from India and only 72 hours in the country itself!  Here are my highlights of the trip:

• This was my first time in India and I was really impressed by both the people and the fusion of culture and technology in the city of Bangalore.  Taxi rides were .. ehm ... exciting! ;-)
• The conference itself was huge!  Huge venue, huge turnout.  Great to see that level of interest in JBoss technologies.  Conference producers (Saltmarch Media) did an excellent job.
• Man, we (JBoss) are working on a lot of cool and diverse stuff.  It's tough to pay attention to everything we are doing in the community, so this was a great chance to get a quick rundown of what a lot of other projects are up to.  I was surprised to see how well Spring and CDI can integrate in Ray's talk.  The CapeDwarf work that Ales has been doing was completely new to me and very cool.
• On the Monday before the conference, Magesh and I met to run through our presentation and we both came to the realization that there's too much stuff to talk about in a single presentation.  This is really a testament to how much our contributors have been able to create in SwitchYard in a relatively short period of time.  The upshot here is that you can expect us to grow Infinispan-style in future conferences, with multiple focused presentations on cool bits of SwitchYard.

All of the talks will be available for download and video will be available as well.

A quick heads up that I have posted the presentations and lab materials from our recent SwitchYard workshops to our community space.  So if you want to learn a bit more about SwitchYard or just really like to review presentation slides, head on over and check it out.

http://community.jboss.org/wiki/SwitchYardWorkshop-Asia

Forge is pretty darn cool.  If you haven't had a chance to play with it yet, it's basically a command-line framework for creating applications.  There are a couple things I really like about Forge.  First, it's quite pluggable, so it's easy for developers to create new tooling that integrates seamlessly with the Forge environment.  Second, it dramatically speeds up the process of creating a new application for users.  I used to use Maven archetypes quite a bit to create new applications from a template definition.  The one drawback with this approach is that the new application is static - you only get what you created from the template.  Forge allows you to add behavior and functionality to an application after it's created - stuff like project dependencies, configuration and code generation.  We use Forge quite a bit within SwitchYard, so I thought it would be interesting to share an example of how Forge can be used when creating SwitchYard applications. 

Check out the video and let us know what you think.  Musical accompaniment appears to be a requirement for Forge videos, so I've added a classic tune to the audio track on the vid.

BTW, I recommend watching the video in HD and full-screen mode so that you can actually see what's going on. :-)  Click here for a direct link to the HD version.

Even though SwitchYard is a new project, we have already enjoyed fantastic support from our community.  Prior blog posts have highlighted the initial support for Camel and the addition of a JSON transformer.  For this community spotlight post, I want to point out some work that Mario Antollini has done w/r/t Camel configuration.

Camel supports a wide array of components which accept configuration as a URI.  For example, the following URI configures the Camel File component to consume files from the "/tmp/input" directory:

file:///tmp/input

You can't get much more convenient than that.  This is one of the features that makes Camel such a joy to use.  There are a couple of things to watch out for with URIs though.  First, some components in the Camel community support a ton of config options.  Let's take another look at a file config URI that uses a few more options:

file:///dev/inbound/purchaseOrders?autoCreate=false&bufferSize=1024&initialDelay=10&delete=true&readLockCheckInterval=1000&startingDirectoryMustExist=true&include=*.txt

The above config is a bit chattier and presents two potential challenges:

1)  It's getting tough to parse with the naked eye, which makes reading or updating the config string a bit more error prone.

2)  Validation in tooling is a challenge because we don't have a definition of which settings are allowed and what values those settings can take.

One way to address this is to define a schema for the component configuration and use that to structure the config parameters and validate them.  Here's the same config URI represented as a gateway binding config:

<binding.file xmlns="urn:switchyard-component-camel:config:1.0">
   <operationSelector operationName="someOperation"/>
   <targetDir>/dev/inbound/purchaseOrders</camel:targetDir>
   <autoCreate>false</camel:autoCreate>
   <bufferSize>1024</camel:bufferSize>
   <consume>
      <initialDelay>10</camel:initialDelay>
      <delete>false</camel:delete>
      <readLockCheckInterval>1000</camel:readLockCheckInterval>
      <startingDirectoryMustExist>true</camel:startingDirectoryMustExist>
      <include>*.txt</include>
   </consume>
</binding.file>

Mario has added configuration model support to parse, create, and validate a number of Camel component configs and more are being added.  If you prefer the straight URI route, then that option is still available as well through the base camel binding configuration:

<binding.camel configURI="file:///tmp/input">
    <camel:operationSelector operationName="print"/>
 </camel:binding.camel>

Thanks Mario!

SwitchYard community member Alejandro stepped up with a big contribution this week with a JSON transformer.  Like the existing Java and Smooks transformers, JSON transformers are declared in an application configuration and automatically wired into the SwitchYard bus at runtime.  Here's an example definition:

<transform.json 
            from="{urn:switchyard-quickstart:transform-json:1.0}order" 
            to="java:org.switchyard.quickstarts.transform.json.Order"/>

The JSON transformer takes advantage of the fantabulous Jackson library to map between Java value objects and JSON with ease.  If you would like to see the transformer in action, check out the transform-json project in our Quickstarts repository.

Rumor has it that Alejandro will be submitting an XSLT transformer in the near future as well.  Thanks Alejandro!