Wrapping up the week, wrapping up the month. It's time to look back at all major events that took place over the past seven days, and I am reminded, as always, of what a tremendous experience it is to live in the open source world. And, with JBoss it's easiest to tap into that - JBoss is everywhere, both technologically and geographically.

The first big story of the week is undoubtably, JUDCon India which took place earlier this week (Jan 24-25). With a strong participation (800 attendees) our first JUDCon in the Asia-Pacific zone has been a real success. Our colleagues Jaikiran Pai, Manik Surtani and Galder Zamarreno have published their impressions. The feedback of the attendees themselves is excellent as well: here are the stories published by Aravind Ajad and Nibin Varghese.

We're happy to read stuff like that that! Join us again, and remember, JBoss World and JUDCon Boston (June 2012) are getting closer and closer.

Meanwhile, you have a chance to meet us at FOSDEM 2012 (Feb 4-5, Brussels, Belgium) - here's the schedule of JBoss-themed talks. Max Andersen has also put together a summary of JBossians' participation at other two conferences: EclipseCon (March 26-29, Reston, Virginia) and MOW 12 (April 18-20, Billund, Denmark).

A couple of news regarding Hibernate: Steve Ebersole has been blogging about upcoming natural key support in 4.1. Incorporating natural keys (aka business keys) in your ORM design is a recommended practice, and this is important news, because so far this needed to be handled manually, using criteria or other mechanisms. Right now, it's all declarative and supported by the API. The other bit of news from the same area is provided by Hardy Ferentschik, in regards to the latest improvements to be found in Hibernate Metamodel Generator 1.2.0.CR1.

Mark Proctor has published a blog entry and an update on his implementation of Wumpus World, an artificial intelligence example in the form of an exploring game, illustrating the power of Drools outside the traditional business/financial setting. Now you don't have an excuse for not playing by the rules.

Very often the difference between being productive and struggling is provided by the tools that we use. JBoss Tools (and the integrated JBoss Developer Studio) have been fostering productivity for a long time, and they're living proof that a good IDE is much more than a fancy text editor with a compiler attached. Being able to have news, technologies, examples and quickstarts at your fingertips is one of the well-kept secrets of star developers. Len Di Maggio provides an overview of JBoss Central, a newly added feature which can be found in both JBoss Tools and JBoss Developer Studio, which provides access to all of these goodies - with a simple click.

For those of you who have followed closely the progress of Infinispan 5.1, the good news is that the final version (5.1.0.Final) is out - see the announcement here - pick it up and have lots of fun!

TorqueBox gets another beta, which brings it to v2.0.0.Beta3 - you can read more about the new features here.

Sightings

While they are not at a conference, JBossians still love spreading the word about the good stuff (that we build):

• Peter Larsen will speak at the DC JBUG about Teiid and JBoss Enterprise Data Services on February 8t
• Ben Browning will speak at the Atlanta JBUG about TorqueBox on January 31st
• Eric Schabell will speak at the Portugal JUG on February 16 about OpenShift and JBPM
• Andrew Rubinger will speak at the Utah JUG on February 16 as well about Arquillian

That's all for this week - gather around next week for more updates!