JBoss 2015 – What a Year !

Posted on by Rich Sharples

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I’ve been part of the Middleware (aka JBoss) team at Red Hat for almost 8 years now and I can say pretty unequivocally that 2015 was a huge year. Huge. Huge in terms of growth (the team, revenue, customers); huge in terms of the number of new initiatives and markets we’re taking on and huge in terms of product releases. I don’t plan to enumerate all the year’s achievements here – there are way too many, but I did want to cover a few of the more recent announcements.

xPaaS

The first major milestone we hit with our xPaaS initiative – xPaaS being short-hand for taking our existing middleware products and capabilities and making them first class citizens of the cloud – specifically taking them to cloud environments via OpenShift (Red Hat’s PaaS). This is something we started back in 2012 with JBoss EAP and JBoss EWS on OpenShift 1.0 . In the meantime, OpenShift has been through a significant rearchitecture with 3.0 – adopting de-facto industry standard container technologies like Docker and Kubernetes. With the recent roll-out of OpenShift 3.1 – we’ve added support for additional middleware services :

  • Integration Services – supported JBoss Fuse – connects applications to the data sources, systems and APIs they need.
  • Real-time Decision Services – supported by JBoss BRMS for authoring, managing and executing sophisticated business rules.
  • In Memory Data Grid Service – supported by JBoss Data Grid – our market-leading,  distributed, in-memory key-value store that can boost your application performance and scalability by orders of magnitude.

That’s in addition to the existing Application, Web and Messaging Middleware Services already available on OpenShift. During our xPaaS journey – One of the major design goals for us has always been that no matter where you run JBoss – it’s the same – doesn’t matter if you’re running in a virtualized environment, directly on a public IaaS like EC2 or in our OPenShift PaaS – it’s still JBoss and behaves just the same. Developing apps. for EAP or Fuse on EC2 is no different to developing them for bare-metal or OpenShift. Read more about xPaaS here.

Mobile

Red Hat Mobile Application Platform (RHMAP) 3.6 – Red Hat’s MBaaS (Mobile back-end as a Service) was also released this week – while not a major feature release – this does demonstrate continued momentum (after the Feed Henry acquisition just over a year ago) and integration with existing Red Hat JBoss technologies- specifically the Unified Push Service which was in development upstream at the AeroGear project before we acquired FeedHenry. You can find more about RHMAP 3.6 here.

JBoss EAP 7

Finally we released JBoss EAP 7.0 BETA last week. This is a significant release in every respect; the last major EAP release (EAP 6.0) was back in June, 2012 and EAP 6 is now about 8 months away from entering its long-term maintenance phase. Among the major features in EAP 7 are :

  • New high-performance web subsystem based on Undertow – supporting Servlet 3.1, WebSockets, HTTP Upgrade
  • New high-performance messaging subsystem based on Apache ActiveMQ Artemis – same searing performance as HornetQ but expanded protocol support and Artemis is now the standard message broker for all JBoss products.
  • Supports Java EE 7 – full and web-profile and Java SE 8.
  • Enhanced (JSR-352) batch support – including cluster support, management of batch jobs and IDE (JBDS 9.0) integration
  • Improved upgrade experience from previous versions of EAP / WildFly and better support for competitive migrations using Windup.

I written have a longer blog post dedicated to EAP 7 if you want more detail.

As always – you can download the BETA via the Red Hat Customer Portal or from JBossDeveloper if you don’t have access. Release notes are here. And you’ll need some developer tooling to go with that – JBDS 9.0 is available for download here.

Here’s to a busy and productive 2016 – it’s going to be huge !

 

JBoss EAP 7 BETA Available !

Posted on by Rich Sharples

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Today Red Hat released JBoss EAP 7.0 BETA.  This is the culmination of a couple of years of hard work by the JBoss EAP team at Red Hat and the broader WildFly community. I would like to thank them for their dedication and hard work and offer congratulations on achieving another huge milestone and major step forward in establishing Open Source in the enterprise and JBoss EAP as the open source standard for Java EE.

JBoss EAP 7  is a significant release in every respect; the last major EAP release (EAP 6.0) was back in June, 2012 and after 4 minor feature releases and numerous patch releases, EAP 6 is now just 8 months away from entering its long-term maintenance phase. While EAP 6 will be fully supported for many years to come – all new development and new features will target EAP 7 and beyond.

While Java EE 7 brings a major set of new features to EAP 7 (see below) it’s only a small part of what defines JBoss EAP 7. There are many other major updates in the release to help us keep up with demands of our customers, industry trends and align with other Red Hat products and initiatives.

  • New high-performance web subsystem based on Undertow – supporting Servlet 3.1, WebSockets, HTTP Upgrade
  • Undertow can also be deployed standalone as a lightweight, scalable proxy / load-balancer.
  • Move from JacORB to the standard OpenJDK ORB
  • New high-performance messaging subsystem based on Apache ActiveMQ Artemis – same searing performance as HornetQ with expanded protocol support and Artemis is now the standard message broker for all JBoss products.
  • Support for Java EE 7 – full and web-profile and Java SE 8.
  • Enhanced (JSR-352) batch support – including cluster support, management (liste, start, stop, resume) of batch jobs and IDE (JBDS 9.0) integration
  • Improved upgrade experience from previous versions of EAP / WildFly and better support for competitive migrations using Windup.
  • Improved JNDI, EJB, JMS and WS interoperability between EAP 7 and older versions – useful for side-by-side upgrades.
  • Ability to manage EAP 6 domain hosts and servers
  • Improved management console; easier navigation, and much better support for large scale domain configurations.
  • Graceful shutdown – allows servers to quiesce without aborting in-flight requests or transactions

Also the following features are available as Technical Preview :

  • A new JGroups based DistributedWorkManager
  • Execute JavaScript (using JDK8’s Nashorn), access JNDI and invoke CDI and JPA EntityBeans from JavaScript
  • HTTP 2.0 – connection multiplexing, header compression and server push

Major enhancements to Java EE 7 include :

A more detailed refresher on  on Java EE 7 features here.

As always – you can download the BETA via the Red Hat Customer Portal or from JBossDeveloper if you don’t have access. Release notes are here. And you’ll need some developer tooling to go with that – JBDS 9.0 is available for download here.

Give the BETA a try and give the team some feedback.

 

UP3 take 3

Posted on by Rich Sharples

 Jawbone UP3 Band
 I pre-paid for the much anticipated UP3 band in December 2014, was dissapointed with the release delay and the downgrade from waterproof to splashproof but opted for the discount vs get my money back because I thought it was worth waiting for and worth waiting for Jawbone to get it right. I was dissapointed when my first band failed after just 6 weeks, more so  when the second band failed for exactly the same reason after just 3 months; as did my Wife’s first band after 3 months. After all this I decided enough was enough – I gave Jawbone a chance to explain how they have addressed the expanding case design issue. They didn’t even accept that it was a known issue so I demanded my money back – afer explaing the design flaw to a couple of tech support assistants and one manager I was told they wouldn’t be able to  give me a refund as my original purchase was beyond the 60 day limit and all they could do was send me a replacement. I couldn’t find that time limit easily in their returns policy.

So here I am after 6 months with my 3rd band and my wife with her 2nd band expecting both to fail before Ground Hog Day – essentially a reluctant customer. As most marketers know – if there’s one thing worse than a non customer  – it’s a reluctant customer.

Here’s the thing – the band (aside from previously mentioned design flaw) is very good – it does everything I want in the right form-factor. I think the iOS software is the best on the market in my opinion and they’ve done a decent job of iterating the band software to extend batery life and make sleep tracking easier. Their customer service rocks – they’ve never hesitated to process a return and done it very quickly each time – I suspect practice has made them good at this.

My message to  Jawbone – you can do better than this; you have to do beter than this – it’s a very competitive market. Redesign the band casing / battery, make it waterproof as you orginally claimed and give your loyal but possible reluctant customers and free / cheap upgrade path. 

Net Neutrality

Posted on by Rich Sharples

The FCC decision for Net Neutrality is a monumental decision but may not actually have much impact unless it continues to receive support – it’s obviously going to be challenged, and may be thrown out completely by whoever takes over the Whitehouse.

It’s unfortunate this has become a partisan issue – with the right seeing it as government control of the Internet and siding with the big carriers. IMO – anyone siding with the big carriers on this one has to be wrong.

UPDATE :

These editorials are worth reading :

“Net neutrality’s next chapter: How experts saw today’s milestone and next steps”, Gigaom

Still here

Posted on by Rich Sharples

OK, spent a few hours yesterday importing some older posts from a backup – so (modulo a few images) I have all my posts since 2008. I also re-registered my softwhere.org domain and attempted to set some mappings in WordPress – if you’re reading this then it’s probably worked. I’ve forgotten a lot of the DNS basics so still need to do some research getting a sub-domain (blog.softwhere.org) to map to this blog.

I realize blogging about blogging is pretty sad and I will start posting some more interesting content here real soon – I’ve just got to iron the last few issues.

I’m Back

Posted on by Rich Sharples

After a blogging hiatus – I thought I’d give blogging another try. Rather conveniently – I found this old WordPress blog still active so I’ll continue here. FWIW – between this blog and now – I did have an another hosted WordPress blog but let the domain expire last year due to inactivity. As part of the refresh on this site – I’m going to try and recover some of the posts.

I’ll use this blog to share my thoughts on some of the trends, issues and emerging technology that is impacting the tech. industry.

Fear Uncertainty and Cluelessness

Posted on by Rich Sharples

I’m generally impressed with the quality of our competitors FUD and anti-JBoss marketing. Our competitors may not be super-smart but they generally make up for it in raw man-power (or girl power) and can usually produce reasonably well researched; well articulated arguments. But this latest piece from Oracle is way, way below their usual standards. It contains a multitude of blatantly incorrect statements – most seemingly not through malice but more likely through pure ignorance and laziness.

The only conclusion I was able to draw from the blog post (and it’s not easy to draw any conculsion) is that Oracle answer to pretty much anything is “we can make anything better with Engineered Systems”. If that’s Oracle strategy then they probably need to salvage the hardware business they’ve managed to run into the ground.

By and large, the blog post is of such poor quality that it barely deserves a response but Shane produced one anyway – I guess it presents such an easy opportunity to make Oracle look clueless.

Come on Oracle – get your act together !

Is Java Dead Yet ?

Posted on by Rich Sharples

This question has been asked many times over the last 13 years or so; I’ve answered it numerous times in various dark corners of the web related to these kinds of discussion. But the question came on our JBoss EAP 6 and Data Grid Virtual Launch today, so here’s this year’s answer.

In a word – No.

For a longer answer, here follows my attempt at a substantiation.

It’s part of my job to know what’s coming next and I’ve been tracking a number of sources that track technology adoption and popularity for many years. The first is specific to programming languages – the Tiobe Index.

The question most people have is why after XX years is C still so popular ? My explanation is that it’s still the standard language for embedded devices – device drivers, network appliances, automation systems, etc. And the embedded market has absolutely exploded in the last 5 years.

EASE INTO THE CLOUD : Red Hat Virtual Event

Posted on by Rich Sharples

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Join our online virtual event next Wednesday (June 20th) at 11am ET and hear us talk about some exciting new JBoss products – JBoss EAP 6 and JBoss Data Grid. We have separate developer and operations tracks with speakers from the product teams and customers ready to share their experience of these exciting new technologies. Sign up for free here.

The death of bloated, heavyweight, monolothic enterprise Java …

Posted on by Rich Sharples

… and the rise of the lightweight, agile, dynamic, modular Enterprise Java.

Java EE has long had the perception of being slow, bloated and monolithic. While the Java EE specification doesn’t prescribe a lightweight, modular implementation; neither does it preclude one. So the negative perception of Java EE is more to do with certain implementations than the standard itself. The two dominant commercial vendors of (Oracle and IBM) have, over the last 10 years, done a lot to re-enforce the perception that Java EE has to be complex, bloated and expensive. While at JBoss we’ve been pushing in a different direction for many years. Each of the last major release of JBoss AS has incrementally pushed modularity closer to an ideal where you only pay for what you need (in memory, complexity, CPU).

junk in the trunkPhoto Credit : “Junk in The Trunk”, zappowbang (CC, some rights reserved)

The latest version (JBoss AS 7) – which is also the underlying technology for Red Hat’s commercially supported product (JBoss EAP 6) has pushed the lightweight theme as far as to completely erode the difference between lightweight web containers (like Tomcat) and “heavyweight EE servers”. As far back as 2008 (through the advances in mobile devices and JBoss miniaturization) it’s been possible to run a full Java EE server on something as small as a smartphone; last year at Red Hat summit we ran the entire JBoss keynote demo (starts about 35min) on a cluster of cheap plug-top computers (far less powerful than today’s smartphone).

So it’s great to see IBM following our lead and pulling their own miniaturization stunt – Websphere running on a Rasberry Pi – very cool. Great to see IBM joining us to help change the perception of Java EE.