It's summertime (at least in the northern hemisphere), and while a lot of us are planning our vacations, inspiration does not have a calendar or schedule. So the JBoss team continues to balance work and break time, continuing to deliver great software (in fact we have seen a bountiful harvest of releases since last week) and rally around great ideas for our future roadmap. Here's what happened:

 

An Arquillian wave

 

The Arquilllians have launched another full-scale assault on bug lands, with a slew of releases covering the core and extensions.

 

  • First, Karel Piwko has announced the release of Arquillian Drone Extension 1.1.0.CR2 - mostly a bug fix release.
  • Bartosz Majsak followed close with Arquillian TestRunner Spock 1.0.0.Alpha2 - a component upgrade and bug fix release as well. If you haven't had a chance to try Spock, it's a good moment to give this  Java/Groovy test and specification framework a try now - 
  • Jakub Narloch continues his highly successful Google Summer of Code project with the release of the Arquillian Spring Extension 1.0.0.Alpha2. This is in fact a major overhaul of the previous release providing:
    • the Spring integration functionality has been reorganized so it does not target specific versions, but capabilities (xml, JavaConfig, environment). While capabilities can be traced to the releases in which they have been introduced, this provides a more intuitive way of deciding what needs to be included in the tests;
    • an embedded Spring container has been added, allowing faster testing of features that do not require container capabilities;
    • the Spring extension has been integrated with Arquillian Warp allowing the testing of Spring MVC artifacts like controllers while using Warp and Drone to specify client actions;
  • And last but not least, Aslak Knutsen has announced the release of Arquillian Core 1.0.2.Final, containing bug fixes and minor but important enhancements such as environment variable support.

 

Check all of them out - those bugs won't stand a chance.

 

Well-designed business processes with JBPM and Drools

 

A few updates for jBPM, covering enhancements to the visual design support and services:

 

The jBPM team has announced the release of jBPM designer 2.3.0.Final (read Tihomir Surdilovic's post for more details). And if you thought that business stuff can't be cool too, check voice-driven BPM.

Mauricio Salatino (aka Salaboy) provides some insights into the jBPM form builder.

 

Also, Microsoft Academic Search has been added to the jBPM community service thanks to the community contributor Omar Saif.

 

The biggest strengths of the tight jBPM/Drools integration in jBPM5 are highlighted by another post by Mauricio, who shows us a very useful set of patterns combining processes and rules.

 

Finally, Geoffrey de Smet demonstrates, with hard data, the benefits of the new Selector architecture in Drools Planner 5.5.0.Beta1, concerning memory consumption and general performance.

 

More secure with JBoss AS7 and JBoss EAP6

 

Although the Arquillian team will keep us safe from the bugs, there are many other threats that your application is facing. Luckily, you have many options for securing your JBoss applications. Shane Johnson shows us a pretty advanced option: enabling the special Intel AES-NI instructions that accelerate AES encryption and decryption on JBoss EAP6 running on RHEL6. Why is it important? For one thing, faster cryptographic operations means that you can use stronger options without paying a performance penalty - and read the rest of the article to learn what and how.

 

On the development side, Marek Posolda shows us how to integrate 3rd party identity and service providers with Picketlink: the example covers Google Apps and Salesforce. In the current environment where Platform-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service integration is often a requirement, this is a compelling showcase of Picketlink's capabilities, but also an informative practical guideline.

 

And it's worth mentioning here that Anil Saldhana, JBoss' lead security architect has been selected by OASIS as an OASIS Distinguished Contributor as a recognition of the commitment to contributing to the advancement of open source security standards,

 

Infinispan 5.2.0.Alpha2, now with more Map/Reduce

 

The Infinispan team has announced the release of Infinispan 5.2.0.Alpha, and Vladimir Blagojevic describes quite in detail the Map/Reduce enhancements that have been included in this release.

 


Change of helm for TorqueBox

 

With Bob McWhirther's move as Director of Polyglot for JBoss, the leadership of TorqueBox has passed on to Ben Browning. Congratulations, both Bob and Ben - and keep those releases coming. Oh, one just did:TorqueBox 2.1.0.Final is out.

 

Output buffering for servlet requests

 

JBoss' own Lincoln Baxter continues enhancing his Rewrite project - a trove of useful components for request-driven processing in web applications - regardless of the view technology being used (JSF, Spring MVC), etc.  The last addition as of release 1.1.0.Final is output buffering, which complements the response-enhancing facilities already in place.

 

Community JBoss Mastery

 

The excellent site mastertheboss.com continues it's great series of tutorials with an example of using TimeMachine scheduler on JBoss AS7 by Zemian Deng. A great example of the JBoss AS7 architecture allows seamless integration with other community projects.

 

In addition to that, Francesco Marchioni shares his thoughts comparing JBoss and Oracle middleware, based on earlier blog post by Oracle comparing the two. A good read, especially since it reflects the views of an independent community member.

 

Forge gets a new site

 

Also, the Forge project has a new, Awestruct-powered site. Check it out here.

 

Other releases

 

 

Sightings

 

  • JBUG Beijing has met on July 26, with a rich agenda, featuring Java EE and the Cloud, Hibernate OGM and HornetQ.

 

Thanks for reading our newsletter and see you next week for another roundup.