Dear JBoss Community:
The Web Beans public draft is available for review. Web Beans defines a set of services for the Java EE environment that makes applications much easier to develop, and it is also the core programming model used for Seam. Web Beans is especially useful in the context of web applications, but can also be applied to a broad range of applications. If you’d like to access the public review draft, just go to Gavin King’s blog, and please don’t be shy about giving your feedback. As Gavin says; “this is a great time to get involved!” You can also pick up some of Gavin’s additional thoughts about the Web Beans and EE platform here or, if you are ready to get serious and start learning, I would recommend you take a look at Gavin’s excellent “Introduction to Web Beans” manual.
Ruby-on-Rails runs nicely on JBoss AS. That was my announcement last month, after Bob McWhirter enabled Ruby on Rails users to run their RoR apps on top of JBoss. The latest item to know on this subject is that you can now get it complete with feature-rich clustering built into the server. As I mention in my blog, that probably makes JBoss the very first RoR runtime server to provide true clustering capabilities with load-balancing and state replication. There’s more in store, too: to see into Bob McWhirter’s mind, go to Oddthesis, where you can get excited about the Ruby-on-Rails-on-JBoss roadmap. Nice work, Bob. If you’d like to discuss this project – or the JBoss Cloud project, joining the mailing list is the best way to participate.
JBoss is a premium sponsor of Europe’s largest independent Java community conference: Devoxx. This huge Java-fest takes place December 8th – 12th 2008, in Antwerp, Belgium. Renamed from last year’s “JavaPolis”, this event is the prime opportunity in Europe to meet many of JBoss’s leading developers. Just some of the speakers in this year’s conference line-up includes Mark Proctor presenting on “Rules, Workflow and Event Processing”, Mark Little discussing the architecture of the JBoss SOA platform, and the principles it is based upon; Pete Muir talking about Web Beans; Hibernate Search explored by Emmanuel Bernard; and Thomas Heute with a session entitled “JSF, Ajax, and Seam portlet development with the JBoss Portlet Bridge”. There are also “Birds Of A Feather” sessions, where you can, among many other distinguished speakers, find Dimitris Andreadis and Ales Justin for the very latest news about the upcoming JBoss Application Server 5. That’s just a quick snapshot of the many JBoss rock stars speaking at Devoxx, and full details of all JBoss speakers are on the Red Hat events calendar. For those that miss any particular presentation, there’s always the chance to enjoy a beer with our developers at the JBoss booth after the sesssions. Visitors to the JBoss stand will also have the chance to beat JBoss developers at table football and win free places to JBoss training courses, with other giveaways.
Meanwhile, if you can get to the Paris Java User Group on December 2, I’ll be speaking about the new JBoss Application Server 5 and its Microcontainer. Red Hat Senior Solutions Architect Malik Saheb will also be joining me to discuss Seam and S.O.A., so I hope you can make it.
JBoss Tools is an umbrella project for the JBoss developed plugins that contribute to JBoss Developer Studio, and JBossTools 3.0 Beta 1 has now been released. There are many new features, such as initial Seam 2.1.SP support, improvements to the pages.xml editor, and a user interface for generating Seam Entities. For the full list of highlights and other enhancements by the JBoss Tools team, visit Max Andersons blog here, and also the JBoss Tools news section that has more details and screenshots.
Speaking of JBoss Tools’ contribution to JBoss Developer Studio, the beta version of JBDS 2 is now downloadable (registration required), and available for free. This is a notable Christmas gift to the community, because it includes some special giveaways such as Enterprise Application Platform 4.3 (EAP 4.3) and the SOA Platform 4.3 (SOA-P 4.3), which are JBoss’s certified binaries. The key enhancements to this latest version of JBoss Developer Studio are its added support for SOA Platform 4.3 and related components such as JBoss ESB and Smooks (for data transformation), and a conversation wizard from STP BPMN files to jPDL. There are more new features that you can read about in my blog, or you can go right ahead and download JBDS 2 here.
Through the efforts of the Thincrust team and JBoss’s Bob McWhirter, I’m pleased to be able to tell you that a Fedora + OpenJDK + JBoss AS 5.0 virtual software appliance is available. Full details are here. What’s important with this “JBoxx” is that everything is already (and properly) set up for you inside the appliance. In other words, simply run this on top of a virtualization layer, and there’s no need for any additional tweaking. Not only that, but you can also to run it “in the cloud”: the Thincrust team has uploaded several JBoxx images to Amazon EC2, and it is very easy to access. Why not give your feedback on JBoxx and let us know which direction you would like to see it take in its ongoing development. Even better; if you would like to help with this effort, please follow Bob McWhirter’s new blog or subscribe to the Thincrust mailing list.
JBoss and Red Hat’s involvement in appliances is not only within the virtual domain, but also in the physical sense. The DELL | Red Hat Application Appliance is a fully integrated open source middleware solution, delivered direct from the Dell factory, fully installed and configured, with everything needed to quickly and easily deploy Java and Web 2.0 applications. Supported and certified by Dell and Red Hat., the DELL | Red Hat Application Appliance includes everything you need to run standard Web and enterprise applications based on Java, LAMP or Linux standards.
One of the offerings of the JBoss Subscription is JBoss Operations Network (JON), which is a centralized systems management solution that simplifies the testing, deployment and monitoring of JBoss Middleware, Apache, and other application technologies. Now, it is available as an open source solution in the form of Jopr, which Red Hat’s Chris Morgan describes in his Red Hat Magazine interview as being the technology that is “upstream to JBoss Operations Network”. Jopr is a pluggable project that brings administration, monitoring, alerting, operational control and configuration in an enterprise setting with fine-grained security and an advanced extension model. Embedded Jopr is also an important part of this project, which provides many of the same features as Jopr, but specifically for managing and monitoring a single instance of JBoss Application Server. The Jopr project is written on, and therefore highly plugin-compatible with the multi-vendor RHQ management project, so it should come as no surprise to learn that Jopr also provides support for monitoring basic operating system information on six operating systems. If you’d like to get involved, and even contribute, the Jopr forums are the place to start.
Onward,
Sacha
