Let's meet at the Red Hat Forum 2018 in Zurich!

September 11th is a difficult date to forget, however, this time for a good reason: it's the day the Red Hat Forum 2018 will take place at the Arena Cinemas in Zurich. For those that have attended the RH Forum in previous years you already know it's the place to be and it's just getting better every year. For those that haven't been there, I suggest you take a look at the Agenda.

It's a full day event with keynotes and panel sessions happening before lunch. This year we are lucky to have Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat's President & CEO keynoting on Digital Transformation and how Red Hat's open culture can help you perform this journey. There are other very interesting sessions (many in English!) with leading customers and partners sharing their experiences, including Swisscom, Accenture, SBB, SAP and Microsoft (with whom we are best friends now!), as well as Kiki wearing something red and helping our Country Manager Léonard Bodmer run the show. :)

In the afternoon we split into four parallel tracks with case studies and technical presentations taking place in the cinema rooms. There are very interesting topics presented from customers and partners and I suggest you first take a look at them, but if you are more into tech stuff you may just as well join as at the Red Hat Technology Deep Dive Track that--with the help of Thomas Heute--we've organized this year, as follow:

1.  Pavol Loffay, speaking on very practical aspects of "Observability with Istio Mess".
   
   In this presentation we will walk you through telemetry integration in Istio service mesh. You will learn how observability pillars like metrics and traces are nicely provided by the mesh and in addition to that how services themselves can enrich this information. We will be demoing Kiali, Prometheus and Jaeger on an OpenShift environment.
2.  Yours Truly, on the future of Enterprise Java - "Java EE is Dead! Long Live Jakarta EE!"
   
   Last's year events were cataclysmic for Enterprise Java: Java EE 8 was released, the MicroProfile project produced 2 releases and 7 new microservices focused APIs, and both of them moved over to the Eclipse Foundation with Oracle choosing to open source everything! What has happened? Jakarta EE, the successor to Java EE, is alive and kicking and aims at aligning Enterprise Java to the fast pacing reality of a brave new Cloud Native world. Why this is important to you and what you can do about it? Come to this session to find out.
3. Michael Vorburger & Erik Jan de Wit on a super fun joint presentation showcasing a way of "Teaching Programming using Minecraft on OpenShift".
   
   Computers used to be these "magical tinkering machines" when we were younger. Today, the challenge is to get children excited about learning programming by reducing the time to set up and get started right away in a gamified environment they already love - like Minecraft! We'll show you how with Kubernetes, OpenShift and Minecraft we can progressively do just - at first using our ScratchX extension to get started with graphical programming, and then with a push of a button go to a full development environment set up to start learning and teaching programming. We'll set up an Eclipse Che IDE with continuous builds of the modifications, and a Minecraft server with our OSGi extension that hot reload changes. All code used in the demo of this project is open source and available to anyone.

All fours presenters are based out of Switzerland, are deeply involved with Red Hat product development and would gladly meet with you (and the Geek inside you) at the technical track or the Red Hat booth, to talk about the projects/products we are working on and just about anything Open Source. We would also be very interested to listen to your concerns and experiences with them, as well as hear about any interesting projects you are working on.

We are just one week before the event so if you haven't already registered to attend the Red Hat Forum (which I should mention is free, as in beer, thanks to our beloved Partners), I suggest you do so ASAP and register now - there might still be some available slots, so hurry up!

See you in Zurich!

/Dimitris

Devoxx 11 recap

This year's Devoxx must have been my 4th in a row and I must admit it is my favorite European Java Conference.

We had quite a few related JBoss talks (in general) and JBoss AS related talks (in particular) as I had posted before the event.

On the 2nd day of Devoxx, myself  and Kabir Khan together we organized the JBoss AS 7 Community BOF in which we hosted a panel of fellow JBossians (Carlo De Wolf, Andrew Lee Rubinger, Dan Allen, Pete Muir, Aslak Knutsen, Lincon Baxter III & Max Andersen) that represented a good mix of the various technology groups within JBoss, from Core AS and Testability (Arquillian/Shrinkwrap), to Grid (Infinispan), Tools integration, and more.

After a quick introduction on the features that make JBoss AS7 unique, we followed up with a panel discussion while trying to answer questions from the audience. BOFs are a great way to receive input and exchange ideas (and gripes) with the community, so I would like to thank everyone that participated; your suggestions are taken very seriously and they are often used to change our priorities and shape our roadmaps. The interest remained really high and we kept going until we started eating time from the following OpenJDK BOFs (sorry guys!) at which point we were basically kicked out :)


The following day, Andrew and Dan gave a smashing presentation on the 7 Reasons to Love JBoss AS 7. The (huge) room was completely packed, a clear evidence of the interest that has built up around JBoss AS7. The presentation should be coming online at parleys.com soon, so check it out there in case you've missed it.

It is clear that people are migrating to AS7 in increasing numbers, a trend that will only accelerate with the coming of JBoss 7.1 that targets full Java EE6 compliance. And talking about JBoss AS, 7.1.0.Beta1 went out TODAY so Get It Now!

On the 4th day of the event, Pete gave a very interesting presentation on using JBoss AS7 on OpenShift, Red Hat's PaaS offering. The Cloud is here to stay and OpenShift presents a pragmatic approach to deploying your application on the cloud, right now, on the way to Java EE7. If anything, OpenShift Express is totally free so there is zero-risk for anyone that wants to wet his/her feet with Cloud development.

And exactly because AS7 is Super Fast and Lightweight, it provides an excellent runtime for cloud deployments!

Cheers
/Dimitris

JBoss AS7 at Profict

Last Friday I was invited to talk about the JBoss Application Server project/Enterprise Application Platform and Java EE6 at the Profict Java Summer Camp day in The Netherlands.

It was a bit of an exercise trying to spot the venue on Google Maps because all you could see at this point was a water tower! Apparently, the Google Maps picture was a bit outdated and there was a new office building next to the water tower, however, the renovated tower was indeed part of the complex and the Profict crew was kind enough to take us for a coffee at the top, which offers a great view to the surroundings.

Now onto the actual conference,  my talk was first so I had the opportunity to present Java EE6, from the point of view of the JBoss Application Server project. I've talked about how we started with JBoss AS6 implementing the Java EE6 profile, then moving on to AS7 with a radical architecture change, as well as our current plans about AS7.1 and full profile certification. Slides are available here.

EAP6 will be based off of JBoss AS 7.1 and if you want to get on the bandwagon there is an early access program, or alternatively, start off by developing on the "everything" distro of JBoss AS 7.0.2, released last week, and that should ease the transition to AS 7.1/EAP6 when the time is right.

If you want to use JBoss AS7 in a cloud context, try OpenShift Express/Flex, Red Hat's PaaS offering.

Next engagement is going to be at Devoxx11 for the JBoss AS7 Community BOF with a bunch of other JBoss Developers, so hope to see you there!

Cheers
/Dimitris