JBoss Messaging 2.0 beta is out. According to JBM lead, Tim Fox – New features include, performance, performance, performance, flexible clustering, seamless high-availability, large message support. See Tim’s announcement for details.

Thomas Diesler has some thoughts on how the JBoss Microcontainer could fully implement the OSGi spec. It will be interesting to see the results of this and it will be a great example of the power and flexibility of the JBoss architecture. JBossOSGi 1.0.0 Beta2 was released last week.

If you are eager to try out Eclipse 3.5 / Galileo and want to explor the upcoming features in JBoss Tools / JBDS you now can – JBoss Tools 3.1.0.M1 is available. See what’s new and noteworthy.

The recently released Seam 2.1.2 includes improved support for JAX-RS (RESTful web services) – more details here.

Finally, we have a free online seminar tomorrow (June 10th) at 9am EDT, 3pm CEST which covers Web Beans (JSR-299 / JCDI – Java Contexts and Dependency Injection). More details here.

BoF: Linux Extended IDE – Linux Tracing a BOF by Andrew Overholt et.al. Monday, 19:30, 1 hour and 15 minutes | Room 211

Hands-On: Using the new Common Builder for Push-Button PDE Builds a 4-hour tutorial by Nick Boldt, Andrew Overholt, Andrew Niefer (IBM). Monday, 08:00, 4 hours | Room 201

Executing BPMN by Koen Aers a long talk by Koen Aers. Tuesday, 11:10, 50 minutes | Room 206

Hands on with JBoss Developer Studio a 2-hour tutorial by Jim Tyrrell and Max Rydahl Andersen. Tuesday, 15:30, 1 hour and 50 minutes | Grand Ballroom E

New opportunities for server adapter providers in the new Server View, a 10 min. short talk by Rob Stryker. Wednesday, 11:20, 10 minutes | Grand Ballroom F

An update on the Linux Distros/Tools project,short 25 min talk by Andrew Overholt. Wednesday, 14:30, 25 minutes | Room 209/210Max and John’s Excellent Plug-in Adventure: The Highlight Reel by John Graham and Max Rydahl Andersen. Thursday, 14:30, 50 minutes | Grand Ballroom C

Talking of quality – JSFUnit 1.0.0 has just gone GA. JSFUnit allows you to perform end-to-end, black/white box test execution of JSF 2.0 applications.

Also Jopr 2.2 (still can’t get used to that name) is in beta. Some of the UI improvements are listed here (but no pictures to look at). Jopr btw is the upstream project that we use for JBoss Operations Network.

Finally, JBoss will have a big presence at EclipseCon2009 in Santa Clara, CA in a couple of weeks time – if you want to attend you can get 10% discount on admission courtesy of JBoss.

JBoss Web Services

JBoss DNA

WISE Project

Seam Framework

JBoss Tools Project

JBoss Tools Code Swarm (basic) from Max Andersen on Vimeo.

JBoss Portal Project

I’ll post more when / if they become available.

• Open Source is mainstream and it’s being used extensively to support customer facing, business and mission critical functions.
• Reduced TCO and no up-front license cost are still the major drivers for open source adoption but they’re closely followed by - vendor independence (and specifically MS independence), Quality, Innovation and Convenience / Flexibility. Or as Forrester [1] put it “OSS isn’t just cheap – it’s good and cheap”.
• The main inhibitors to adoption – ‘security’ and ‘lack of support’ and risk of patent / copyright infringement seem to be much less of a concern than a year ago. The suggestion seems to be that these risks are offset by working with commercial open source vendors or experienced System Integrators.
• The rate of Open Source adoption differs between categories of software – Application Development, Server OSes, Databases and Middleware have high adoption whereas Reporting / BI, SOA, Desktop and Security – adoption is much lower but adoption is moving rapidly up the stack.
• North America and Canada are  still behind Europe (excluding the UK) in adopting OSS; adoption is higher in larger organizations; and different industries are adopting OSS at different rates for different areas in the stack.
• Technology isn’t the only thing being adopted – principles and governance of open source is also being adopted in IT and development organizations. This is something I’ve already witnessed a few times.

OK, a little bit more detail from each of the reports.

The first report was prepared for Bull by Forrester [1], and specifically focusses on European and North American companies who have already adopted OSS. I especially like the following, so forgive the repetition :

OSS isn’t just cheap — it’s good and cheap. Only a minority of respondents said that OSS hasn’t met their quality expectations. A vast majority (i.e., 92%) said that their quality expectations have been met or even exceeded. The satisfaction regarding cost was on a similar level at 87%.”

The second report is Actuate’s annual Open Source survey [2]

I’ve only read the North American report and a I presume there’s more detail specific to France, UK and Germany. The report drills down into established open source technologies – Linux, Eclipse, Tomcat and JBoss and it’s nice to see JBoss included along with other Open Source mega-brands like Apache, Linux, MySQL and Eclipse . JBoss adoption in North America is 14.7% and Germany 22.1%  but in France it’s much lower at only 5.7% – while other technologies remain pretty constant. Any thoughts as to why JBoss adoption is so much lower in France or whether this is a bug in the survey  ?

The third and fourth tomes are from IDC [3,4] The first part outlines the key drivers and inhibitors to the adoption of Open Source.  The second part has some very nice detail on how open source technology is ‘acquired’ and how it’s supported and serviced. It demonstrates how a tiny little company called  Red Hat has managed to compete with and in many cases lead some much more established (ie. older) and significantly larger companies in the distribution and support of Open Source technology. That said – you can’t help but accept that without huge companies like IBM, Oracle and HP – distributing and supporing Open Source technology – it wouldn’t be as successful or as established as it is today.

As I keep saying – money makes the world go round and that’s true for the world of Open Source too.

[1] Open Source Paves The Way For The Next Generation Of Enterprise IT, Forrester Consulting, November 2008

[2] ACTUATE / Survey Interactive :Annual Open Source Survey, North America Edition, 2008

[3] IDC 2008 Industry Adoption of Open Source Software, Part 1 : Usage Drivers and Inhibitors

[4] IDC 2008 Industry Adoption of Open Source Software, Part 2 : Project Adoption

Lunar Eclipse, originally uploaded by sharps.

The clouds cleared enough for me to take a some pictures of the lunar eclipse tonight. The star above is Regulus, and Saturn is on the left. This was the only picture worth posting.

My setup is simple – Nikon D40, tripod and remote shutter release.