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

Thanks to all of you who helped make our fourth annual Red Hat Government Users & Developers Conference (RHGUDC) a success. This year’s conference theme was “Today, Tomorrow, Together,” which showcased our collaboration both with partners and customers to share best practices and updates on open source technologies within the government. Check out coverage from Joab Jackson of GCN highlighting some of the events: “Pentagon – Open Source Good to Go.”

Respectfully,
Paul Smith, General Manager & VP of Public Sector Sales Operations

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is crucial for enterprises that need to integrate and optimize their disparate IT assets supporting business processes. I’m excited to report that JBoss has released its next-generation SOA platform, the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 4.3, including JBoss Operations Network 2.1 support. JBoss is currently in an intense period of many new announcements and new releases, but the new SOA Platform is an especially important milestone for JBoss. The JBoss Enterprise SOA platform is a single platform to find, integrate and orchestrate SOA business services, enterprise applications, and other IT assets into automated business processes. Version 4.3 is important because it takes the JBoss SOA platform to an unprecedented level of functionality that offers enterprises new tools to effectively plan, deploy, manage and monitor open source SOA.

The new features in JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 4.3 include much-expanded ESB features such as new gateway listeners; a declarative security model; improved web services integration and additional scripting languages that will accelerate enterprise adoption of open source SOA by enabling simpler web services integration and deployment. This latest release has equally impressive new Rules Features; Stateful Rules services, decision tables and Rule agent support are all new capabilities that will further enable business event processing with an event-driven architecture (EDA), as well as allow non-developers to construct business rules and enable rapid deployment.

The release of JBoss Operations Network 2.1 is an important inclusion into the latest SOA platform; it is a critical factor in helping to reduce the cost of ongoing operations of enterprise SOA deployments. Some of the new capabilites of JBoss Operations Network 2.1 include scalable and centralized management for JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform, remote platform configuration and deployment, automatic ESB service inventory discovery, monitoring metrics, patch management, and JBoss ESB service monitoring. Congratulations to Pierre Fricke and all of the contributors for this impressive achievement and step forward in JBoss’s SOA capabilities.

Mobicents has become the very first Open Source Certified SIP Servlets 1.1 (JSR 289) container. This actually makes JBoss more-or-less the first vendor to achieve compliance, even among commercial vendors. This is the latest in a fast-moving chain of Mobicents developments, and as lead Mobicents developer Ivalin Ivanov says in his blog “There is simply no competitor – commercial or open source that comes close to this mega bonus pack”. Sip Servlets 1.1 also features new capabilities beyond the scope of the specification, such as the SIP Load Balancer; see here for more details on SIP Servlets 1.1 full capabilities.  Well done to Jean Deruelle, Vladimir Ralev, and the rest of the Mobicents team for leaving the competition well and truly in the dust.

JBoss Cache is an integral part of the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. In addition, it provides enterprise-grade clustering solutions to Java-based frameworks, application servers or custom-designed Java SE applications. I’m pleased to tell you that JBoss Cache 3.0 is now available, and is a large evolutionary step in the design of JBoss Cache, where the two existing locking schemes have been deprecated (pessimistic and optimistic) in favor of MVCC.  MVCC (multi-version concurrency control) is a scheme commonly used by database vendors to ensure a high degree of concurrency for reading threads, as well as guaranteeing correctness for writers. JBoss Cache’s approach to MVCC is heavily optimized for readers, offering lock-free access to data for reading threads. This translates to a very high degree of performance in read-heavy systems such as caches, and is heavily optimized for modern multicore and distributed architectures. The impressive performance comparisons with existing schemes can be seen here. Further to MVCC, significant performance improvements have been made in many other areas of the cache. These improvements include asynchronous replication; serialization of arrays; and cache loading, as well as a new batching API to batch cache operations into atomic units, independent of JTA transactions.

One of the important aspects of our upcoming JBoss Application Server5 is its new architecture, and its high level of compatibility with other technologies. The latest development in this context is the possibility of running Ruby On Rails on JBoss AS5. JBoss’s Bob McWhirter has achieved this via JBoss Rails, which is a deployer for JBoss AS 5.x to enable deployment of Ruby-on-Rails (RoR) projects. Applications run on the JVM by utilizing JRuby and JRuby-Rack so that now, JBoss Rails can now be used from a traditional Rails application. Follow Bob’s project page for ongoing developments.

The 1.0.0.GA release of a new JBoss Cache 1.4 series-based implementation of Hibernate’s 3.2 Second Level Cache provider means good news for clustered applications where there is a need to maintain cache consistency around the cluster. The Second Level Cache is a Hibernate feature that allows entities, collections and queries to be cached in memory beyond the scope of a transaction,  resulting in increased speed and efficiency. Galder Zamarrenno did a lot of the sweat-work on this, and he tells me that the end-result is a “Hibernate Second-Level Cache Provider that performs and scales much better than any previous version”. Incidentally, JBoss Portal will bundle this new cache provider starting from 2.6.7 and 2.7.0, whose CR1 version was also recently released.

Following on from last month’s news about the latest Seam technology, Seam 2.1.0 GA is now available. While Open Source is often seen as a way to avoid proprietary vendor lock-in, it’s important to not lose sight of the importance of open standards as well. After all – a single source, open source technology that isn’t based on standards could just as easily be used to lock you in. JBoss has always been committed to open standards – from standardizing Hibernate through JPA and our work in driving the standardization of many aspects of Seam, through the Web Beans specification. We want to lock you in – we just want to do it through superior quality and value; not through API’s! You can find much more information on this important subject on the Seam Framework pages that provide a Web Beans overview, including answers to questions like “How does Seam relate to Web Beans?”, and “Will Seam “become” Web Beans?.”

In the midst of all these exciting recent developments from JBoss, why not take a look at some of the pages on Dzone, where there are a number of articles that give a great insight into some of the latest JBoss technologies. For example, for those who would like a closer look at some of the qualities of the JBoss microcontainer, take a look at Ales Justin’s “A Look Inside the JBoss Microcontainer, Part I — Component Models”. Bill Burke’s “Putting Java to REST” article gives a great explanation of how to write RESTFul Web services using the Java language, while Bela Ban’s “A Simple Clustered Task Distribution System” introduces the basic concepts of JGroups, then implements a task distribution system to demonstrate what it can do. The new JBoss microzone RRS feed gives a full overview of all the Dzone articles on JBoss.

Onward,

Sacha