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MarcAndBob Our next installment of the JBoss Diaries features Bob Bickel, VP of Corporate Strategy and Development, discusses joining JBoss and the Professional Open Source ecosystem. Check out the JBoss Podcasts, or drag this RSS link to your iTunes podcast playlist.

 

We've pushed out the next episode of The JBoss Diaries with Marc Fleury interviewing Scott Stark. In this episode, Scott talks about his beginnings with JBoss, his insane fascination with enterprise security, and current issues with Professional Open Source Development.

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This is a video podcast, so you can subscribe using iTunes, snarf the RSS feed, or visit JBoss Labs.

 

We released another installment in the JBoss Labs Podcast where we interview Norman Richards, author of JBoss: A Developers Notebook, XDoclet in Action, and JBoss 4.0 The Official Guide. In this episode we discuss JBoss books currently on the market, which books are right for who, and what JBoss books are in the works. Also, Norman gives pointers to those in the community on how to write Professional Open Source books and articles.

 

This is the first audio podcast in the Profile of a Professional Open Source Committer series. You can view/hear the podcasts by either downloading iTunes then after installing subscribing to the feed using this link or just visiting the Podcast section on JBoss Labs.

 

First, the facts: We've introduced Podcasts at JBoss, and they can be found at our community development web site, JBoss Labs. JBoss Podcasts will cover video and audio training for open source software as well as interviews with professional open source developers.

 

Click here if you aren't familiar with podcasts. To subscribe to the podcast cut and paste the URL to the feed into your iTunes podcasts subscriptions. It's a video, so you will need the latest iTunes 6.0.1. You can also view the video with your browser. You just need to make sure that you have the latest version of Quicktime installed. Future podcasts will be just audio in addition to more video entries.

Now, why:

 

Like many computer geeks, I've a voracious appetite for science fiction. On a recent trip to do a J2EE training, I decided I'd try out this trend called podcasting. Well, I'd tried it before, but I'd never really taken the time to peruse the iTunes podcast library and spend a few minutes concentrating on choosing and subscribing to podcasts which sound interesting. I read the blog BoingBoing quite frequently, and one of their primary contributors is a keen sci-fi author, Cory Doctorow. He's been talking about doing a series of spoken-word podcasts of his in-progress short fiction. So, I clicked to his site, craphound.com (named as such due to his constant collecting of junk), and found his link to the podcast feed. I snarfed up the link and jammed it into iTunes, along with several other podcasts that looked interesting: A few on Dr. Who, a couple on developing SOA, and a few public radio news feeds.

 

On that trip, I only listened to maybe two podcasts, but three weeks later the video iPod came out. I checked again. I looked into my podcasts subscription and found that I'd been downloading all the sci-fi and others for three weeks now. I added a couple movies, and clicked "Get".

 

Now, another plane ride, I slipped on the ear-buds and clicked on "After the Siege" and "When SysAdmins Ruled the Earth" by Doctorow. Fifteen episodes later, I was hooked. Now I'm listening all the time, and I can't wait to get into the videos. There are hundreds of podcast feeds that are being published by individuals as well as corporations, all discussing what interests them the most. It's a great way to find out what people are talking about, outside of blogs, and with time-shifting built in. Since I never watch TV and spend my time with the wife and kids when I get home, this is the only way to catch up with forms of media other than written word. And I can do it on the road.

 

At JBoss Labs, our focus is enhancing community open source communication. We want to help professional open source developers get the recognition they deserve and help them communicate their ideas. The podcasts I've been listening to are primarily created by the community for the community. They are developers talking about their ideas and they are forward thinkers speaking their minds about how they believe technology will affect us. The first episode of JBoss Labs Podcasts embodies the type of information that we want to communicate: What it means to be a Professional Open Source Developer.

 

We are going to add at least three more channels in addition to the current video feed:

  1. Video Podcast Training: Learn how to use a piece of open source software from the people who created it.
  2. Audio Interviews: For those who don't have one of those fancy new video iPods yet, we'll still provide the interviews.
  3. An aggregated feed which contains all feeds in one

 

Any project on Labs can publish a podcast; however, the Labs Team will do what we can to get every Labs project's lead interviewed and some personalized training podcasts for their work. After all, most of them are putting everything they have into their project. Let's find out who they are and make it easy for all those other professional open sourcers on the move to learn about their work.

 

To that point:

 

Thanks to Adam Warski of the Shotoku project for all his hard work, and to Pawel Wrzeszcz, the latest member of JBoss Labs.

 

Recent inquiries have indicated confusion on the date and reasons around the move of the JBoss CVS repository on SourceForge to a dedicated public repository. The CVS repository on SourceForge was moved to a collocated set of servers at InterNAP in Atlanta Georgia on April 23rd of 2005. Due to the size of the repository and the time that the community was spending waiting on repository transactions, JBoss moved its CVS repository to a set of servers which have both hardware and network infrastructure dedicated completely to its intended use.

 

JBoss publicly announced this move before it took place and notified the open source community of the change in infrastructure and process. Also, all documentation explaining how to access the public CVS repository was updated at the time of the move. See:

 

http://wiki.jboss.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=CVSRepository

 

The above document states how to access the repositories, both committer and anonymous. Both repositories are identical and synchronized. They were both created from an archive delivered from SourceForge.net. All historical information was preserved.

 

JBoss' CVS Repository was, is, and always will be open to the public. JBoss is dedicated to providing the best service possible and the move of the repository guarantees the community has rapid access to all JBoss source code.

 

JBoss maintains its relationship with SourceForge and this move was in no way a negative statement towards SourceForge. We continue to host our development and user mailing lists at SourceForge. Additionally, all community development at JBoss will continue to integrate with SourceForge repositories whenever necessary.

 

To reiterate, the JBoss CVS Repository was moved six months ago and in no way did that move correlate with recent activities of certain members of the community.

 

Sincerest Regards,



Damon Sicore
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dsicore@jboss.org JBoss Labs Lead 214-883-6733
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One of our primary goals at JBoss Labs is to create visibility for the community activities occurring every day in the trenches of open source projects. As an early adopter of JBoss, I remember when you could go to ejboss.org and see the list of core developers, and it had a real edgy feel to it. It even had the slogan: "Coding the Future." I don't know if anyone at the time realized what that would lead to. Eventually, we began to see pictures of those developers on the site, and well, that gave the community a set of faces. It wasn't much, but it was one of my favorite places in the site to visit. Just who are these guys creating all this cool stuff?

At JBoss Labs, we're bringing it back. Blog feeds are king on Labs, and we're filling them with community activities and we're focusing on the developers whenever we can. As we add each project to Labs, we're going to show you the faces behind the projects with interviews and pictures of the project leads and developers--not to mention, all the project news possible.

In addition to the community focus, Labs is building out a set of project metrics to help project developers track and boost community activity. These metrics will be displayed using the Kosmos portlets, which are summarized displays of committer activity, JIRA task and bug tracking, and build status. Each project has a blog, wiki, forums, and a set of what we call 'freezones' which are a place that community projects can host any content they want, such as documentation, screenshots, and special downloads (or in the case of our PortletSwap project, community contributions).

So, this weekend JBoss Labs 1.0.1 was released and our project is shaping up nicely. One of the star projects of Labs, JBoss Wiki, was deployed on it's first release (see it in action here). JBoss Wiki is a JSR 168 compliant wiki which means that it can be deployed in any compliant portlet container, but of course we recommend deploying in JBoss Portal 2.0.

Initial features of JBoss Wiki include:
  • A plugin system which allows for different "wiki types."  So, we use plugins to translate different wikitext or add contextual content through plugin chains.
  • All wiki pages are accessible via http://server/wiki/XYZ pattern (i.e., http://labs.jboss.org/wiki/Main )
  • Fully supports the JSPWiki page syntax and formatting
  • History, rollback, and diff tools are supported.
  • Integrates, as a JSR 168 Compliant Portlet, with JBoss Portal 2.0 utilizing all security constructs provided to portlets.
  • Supports attachments for logged in users with proper permissions
  • Has an embedded search mechanism.
  • Supports a bread crumb trail.
The full road map of JBoss Wiki can be viewed at:

http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/JBWIKI

And the road map for JBoss Labs is here:

http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/JBLAB

JBoss Wiki is just a single project at JBoss Labs, and we are adding more. We always need community feedback. It is what Labs is all about. So, I encourage you to comment and let us know what you think and where Labs can be improved or features added. Visit our forums and tell us your thoughts.

Thanks to all in the Labs team for making this deployment a success, and a special thank you the community members who provided us with all the feedback.

Damon Sicore
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JBoss Labs Lead