JBoss App Server 5.1.0 CR1 – 5.1 is a pretty big milestone – it includes the new Jopr powered embedded console  – something you’ll like but also something we really need some early feedback on. Also a preview of Web Beans / JSR-299. [release notes, downloads]

Data Integration goes Open Source – I missed the launch of the Teiid Project you can find out more on the project page.

This has been brewing for a while and Manik has finally announced Infinispan – I predict that this is going to  be a pretty disruptive technology. [home page, quick guide]

JBoss Tattletale is a new tool that will analyze your code and produce detailed dependency reports – for example highlighting duplicate jars / classes, missing jars / classes, etc. [downloads, project]

The latest release of Jopr (2.2) is out – Jopr is the upstream project for JBoss Operations Network (see below). There are a shedload of UI enhancements, support for JBoss EWS and Performance improvements among other things.

Also a nice article on JBoss Cloud over on DZone.

On the JBoss Enterprise side of the house :

JBoss Operations Network 2.2 is out and JON receives a pretty decent makeover (see Greg’s post on some of the major enhancements) – product page is here.

One of the new capabilities of JON 2.2 is support for JBoss Enterprise Web Server (EWS) which was also released a few weeks ago – more on that in a future post.

If you’re currently stuck with Oracle Weblogic or IBM Websphere and need help getting off – here’s an opportunity you can’t ignore.

Sorry for the length of this post – I need to do this more frequently. The next couple of months are going to be even more hectic and you can follow the @JBossNews via Twitter. Finally, something from the happy news files – we’re still hiring.

Heiko Rupp has published a guide to writing plugins for JOPR / JON.

It looks like SpringSource had their annual developer event this week; Spring are well respected for their technology – but their marketing team seem to be stuck in 2002 – Andrew Rubinger has a perspective.

Gavin King has an update on the progress of the WebBeans spec. (aka JSR-299) public review – it’s clear that WebBeans will really change the way Java EE is perceived.

Many of the components that comprise JBoss AS 5 and the future EAP 5.0 are starting to coalesce. I’ll write a fuller post over the weekend but here are some of the highlights :

• JBoss Microcontainer 2.0.0 is out
• Hibernate Search 3.1 is out
• JBoss Cache 3.0.1 is out
• JBoss Web 2.1.1 is out
• RestEasy 1.0 beta 9 is out

Every cloud has a silver lining. There’s a common opinion that the adoption of Open Source will only increase if the world’s economies continue to weaken. [O'Reilly Radar, Red Hat's Jim Whitehurst]

Colleague Piere Fricke has written a piece for Network World on Open Source SOA – that’s Simple Open and Affordable – not just Service Oriented Architecture.

According to the Linux Foundation – Fedora 9 (the OS of choice for yours truly) would cost $10.8 billion to develop from scratch; and the Linux kernel alone would cost $1.4 billion. The summary of the report is that “Collaborative development creates enourmous economic value”. No shit Sherlock. I wonder how much money Linux or OSS in general has actually saved companies in the last 17 years.

Bob McWhirter has been playing around with Ruby and JBoss – here’s his first progress report. The start of something cool I’m sure.

JAX-RS (aka JSR 311) is approved – now we just need a TCK. Bill has just released beta 8 of RestEasy and also posted some REST inspired articles on DZone (Intro. to REST, Putting Java to REST). Bill also provides some sage and hard-earned advice for Rod Johnson – I agree, and said this a while back – monetizing OSS is about more carrot and less stick.

Over on the JBoss Portal blog – there’s some nice horizontal scalability testing results. Portal is getting a real shot in the arm – we have a new Product Manager (thanks IBM) and a new project lead and the team seems pretty fired up. We even made Gartner’s MQ for horizontal portals – not bad given the young age of the project.

There’s probably a really good, practical reason to run JBoss AS on an iPhone – I just can’t imagine what it is. Here’s how you do it.

Here’s another interesting project – Heiko Rupp has a two part blog (part1, part2) about home automation with RHQ. RHQ is the Hyperic / Red Hat collboration that we use to build JBoss Operations Network.

Bil Burke reports that JAX-RS is almost final. Bill’s RestEasty project is now shipping beta 6 and has been promoted to a new location on JBoss.org.

Matt Asay’s has a couple of positive articles about Red Hat and JBoss on his c|net blog. The first suggests that Red Hat’s superior value proposition will insulate it from any IT spending slow-down. The second is based on a survey from Goldman Sachs that shows some real facts about Linux vendor adoption. Red Hat is way out ahead and likely to grow.

Talking of Linux – I think the London stock exchange

Talking of growing communities – interest in JBoss in China is really picking up – there’s a new site dedicated to JBoss – Kava which contains translations of many JBoss related blogs and articles you’d find in North America and Europe.

GNU is twenty five years old this month – and Stephen Fry (English comedian, author, actor, columnist and tech. blogger) has a short video celebrating the event and introducing free software. btw. his podcasts are pretty good as well; if you’re a Stephen Fry fan and enjoy a light-hearted perspective on technology.

This week the Web is aflutter with the launch of Google’s browser – Chrome. Just for the record – I don’t think that Microsoft will win this browser war – give it 3-5 years and IE users will be in the minority – they’ve failed to innovate at the pace of the competition (Firefox) and haven’t established a Mobile Web foothold; and their desktop monopoly is finally being challenged (by OS/X, Linux and the mobile web). The thing is – IE won’t be the only victim in this war – other’s will get caught in the cross-fire – I think Safari will go down pretty quickly – probably within a year of Chrome being ported to the iPhone. Firefox (the only browser I’ve used for as long as I can remember) will be next. That bothers me – but only a little – that’s techology evolution – survival of the fittest (despite illegal monopolies). I’m happy for *any* free, multi-platform alternative to IE.

Finally, I think I pissed off a few ex-colleagues at Sun with my recent post. Thing is, I’m right. If you thought my post was overly critical (or wrong) – read this analysis on Forbes.com and try and argue against the fundamental arithmetic. It’s worth repeating my position – I’m not saying that Sun’s OSS efforts are wasted – I’m just saying they won’t save Sun. The projects and the people who’ve pushed them so hard will continue to flourish long after Sun has been dismantled and sold off.

JBoss Cache is now searchable – and JBC is turning into a bit of a family project !

From what I’ve read so far – Red hat scored some Brownie points for disclosing the recent intrusion. I doubt all vendors would’ve been so transparent.

Red Hat IT switched over to JBoss EAP 4.3 – they’d outgrown Tomcat and needed some of the more advanced features to keep all our applications running all the time. I’ve been lucky enough to get a quick overview of how they’re managing their JBoss cloud – hopefully we’ll get more details out. But Project Genome was a result of some of the work they’ve done.

Finally – don’t forget to vote (no not that) – this.

You can now catch up with videos from the JBoss community about JBoss people and technology on YouTube, blip.tv and Streamocracy,

Tha VAR Guy on Red Hat, desktop Linux and JBoss middleware.

Red Hat’s JBoss business hits overdrive. Matt Asay of c|net interviews my boss – Craig Muzilla (VP of Marketing for the JBoss division).

JBoss Tools 3.0 Alpha has been released – see Max’s blog posting for details.

Finally (and this isn’t specifically about JBoss) – theres an opinion piece in CIO magazine by Bernard Golden which suggests that SAP and Oracle have basically run out of ideas and innovation and are just milking their customers for everything they can.

Robert Tiller (Red hat’s assistant General Council) has provided a pretty accessible explanation behind the recent Firestar settlement – the full settlement text (minus the financial details) is included. Meanwhile, Mike Dillon (Sun’s General Council) blogged that he’s confident that Sun’s legal team has nailed Firestar with Prior-Art and may have sucessfuly convinced the PTO to reject the original Patents. It’s great to see Patent Trolling effectively challenged from multiple directions – the more that happens the less $attractive$ it looks – the downside is that these people will just fall back to purse-snatching and pyramid schemes (or whatever they did before).

Forrester recently surveyed some European CIOs and have come to the conclusion that Open Source can save money but that OSS vendors need to demonstrate value. No shit Sherlock !

According to Forrester, this puts pressure on open-source suppliers such as Red Hat Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc. “These companies can’t compel annual maintenance fees through upgrade rights, so they will need to demonstrate superior value through excellent service, or IT shops will look to internal support or third parties instead,”

Which is why it’s important to be the best in the business at supporting your customers.

This week I’ve been trying (and predictably failing) to keep up with Le TdF. Talking of performance enhancements  – Manik (lead for JBoss Cache) blogs about a new feature in JBoss Cache 3.0.0 – MVCC – pretty hot stuff. This hot apparently.

If you are an Oracle or former BEA middleware customer and are still uncertain which products Oracle will shit-can – well it seems that Oracle doesn’t know either but they are letting you vote. I applaud the democratic proces but isn’t this the kind of detail you work out before spending $6bn of your shareholder’s money ?

[Update]

The poll doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Oracle – it’s sponsored by TechTarget – I have no idea why. They seem to have made the decision already – according to the Register.

Finally – can you please get off Yahoo’s case about departing execs. – this is just mean