Jakarta EE action at Devoxx Belgium 2018

Devoxx Belgium 2018, my favorite Java (& more) conference in Europe is just around the corner with the Deep Dive sessions starting tomorrow (Nov/12th-13th), followed by the three main conference days (Nov/14th-16th).

I thought I should write a quick note to point out that there is a lot of Jakarta EE action happening with eight Jakarta EE sessions you can easily query for here, or let me save you a click and paste directly the results below:

JakartaEE - The New Home of Cloud Native Java by Ivar Grimstad, Dimitris Andreadis , Dmitry Kornilov, Gaël Blondelle, Kevin Sutter, Markus Eisele, Ondro Mihályi (Conference)
From Java EE to Jakarta EE by Dmitry Kornilov (Quickie)
The Jakarta EE Community BOF by Dimitris Andreadis, Ivar Grimstad , Dmitry Kornilov, Kevin Sutter (BOF)
Implementing Microservices with Jakarta EE and MicroProfile by Ivar Grimstad, Kevin Sutter (Deep Dive)
Speed Dating with Jakarta EE by Kevin Sutter (Ignite)
Jakarta EE: The Future of Cloud Native Java is Open! by Gaël Blondelle (Conference)
Java EE, Jakarta EE, MicroProfile, Or Maybe All Of Them? by Sebastian Daschner (Conference)
Jakarta EE / MicroProfile + WebStandards, On Stage Hacking #noslides by Adam Bien (Conference)

I am happy to be participating in two of those sessions:

• The Jakarta EE Community BOF, on Wednesday evening at 20:00. An informal Jakarta EE community gathering of like minded developers, specification leads and Jakarta EE representatives from different companies. Please note that the event will be relocated(!) from the BOF 2 room to Kelly's Irish Pub downtown Antwerp, meaning we are turning the BOF into a mini symposium with free drinks to accompany great discussions! We will be tweeting details for registering for the event, so stay tuned and look for those tweets from @dandreadis, @ivar_grimstad , @m0mus, @kwsutter.
• JakartaEE - The New Home of Cloud Native Java, on Friday at 11:40, a panel discussion on the present and future of Jakarta EE coordinated by Gaël Blondelle from the Eclipse Foundation, and representatives from Cybercom, Red Hat, Oracle, IBM, Payara & Lightbend.

 There are also other fellow Red Hatter presenting, so check out their sessions or meet us at the Red Hat booth:

• Alex Soto, Writers-Write! The documentation BOF
• Antoine Sabot-Durand, Microprofile, Past, Present & Future BOF
• Burr Sutter, 9 Steps to Awesome with Kubernetes & Kubernetes: your next Java Application Server
• Emmanuel Bernard, Data in a Microservices World, from Conundrum to Options, & Les Cast Codeurs Podcast
• Geoffrey De Smet, The Battle of 2 automated conference talk scheduling algorithm for Devoxx
• Madou Coulibaly, Data in a Microservices World, from Conundrum to Options
• Mario Fusco, OOP vs FP 

The fun is about to start - see you very soon at Devoxx Belgium!

/Dimitris

 

Conference action - from Soft-Shake in Geneva to Devoxx in Antwerp

Fall is a busy conference period and parallel to our team's ambitious WildFly and JBoss EAP release goals I always try to squeeze in a few days into my schedule for opensource advocation and meeting with our communities.

So the week before I've had the pleasure of presenting on WildFly Swarm at Soft-Shake'17 in Geneva. It's a short 1.5h ride with the train from Neuchâtel so it feels pretty much local: you can get there, present and be back for dinner. And it's also very much francophone, although, they do accept talks in English.

If you don't know about WildFly Swarm, our sister project to WildFly, I suggest you check it out. Especially if you come from the Java EE direction, WildFly Swarm facilitates the transition to developing Microservices and Cloud Native applications. It also implements the Eclipse Microprofile specification.

The latest published spec for Microprofile is version 1.2 and you can get a very nice introduction about what it includes here.  If you want to try out Microprofile v1.2 on Wildfly Swarm check out this Tech Preview.

Now within less than 12 hours I should be on my way to the annual Devoxx.be pilgrimage.

• If you are around on Monday evening, come over to the WildFly Community BOF at 20:30. It's been an exciting year for Java EE, with the release of Java EE 8 and the announcement of the move of Java EE to the Eclipse foundation under the Eclipse Enterprise for Java project (EE4J). Coupled with the fast paced Microprofile releases and the Microprofile effort also moving to Eclipse, and we have a very different landscape carved up for Java EE going forward. So do come to this BOF to discuss the latest developments and how they are affecting the WildFly community projects. I will be co-hosting this with Edson Yanaga, Director of Developer Experience at Red Hat who also has a deep-dive session in the morning.
• Then on Thursday evening I am participating at the Opening Up of Java EE panel discussion (room 6, 17:50) hosted by David Delabassee alongside distinguished members of the Java EE community, Mike Croft, Ivar Grimstad, Martijn Verburg and Steve Poole. If you are interested in the future of Java EE and it's re-incarnation as a completely open Eclipse project, this is the place to be.

See you all very soon at Devoxx in Antwerp!

/Dimitris

Voxxed Days Athens - Recap

After a very successful Voxxed Days Thessaloniki last October, it was now Athens' turn to host the popular event series, and another chance for yours truly to visit the motherland, talk about the interesting stuff we are doing here at JBoss/Red Hat, meet with old friends and make new ones.

Voxxed Days Athens was very well attended with something like 450 participants, numerous sponsors and a great lineup of international and local speakers.

I very much enjoyed the talks of

• Johan Janssen on "the Internet of Lego Trains" - I guess not so much about using Akka Actors, rather mostly about doing stuff with RaspberryPis & Legos.
• Heather Vancura on "the JCP - Java Community Process" - being actively involved with Java EE for the past 15 years, I'm quite familiar with the JCP, but that was the first time I've actually got to meet Heather in person; I guess, it's never too late.
• Dimitris Livas on "Continuous learning of Professionals in an evolving world" - very interesting approach of applying agile development principles not for developing systems but actually developing individuals. I'm keeping a personal note to learn more about it.
• Yours Truly on "Turning your Java EE Monoliths into Microservices using WildFly Swarm"- I very much enjoyed giving the talk and I'd like to thank the populous and lively audience that attended. You can find the slides from my presentation here. 
• Panagiotis Moustafellos on "360 monitoring of your services" - in this distributed cloud-based microservicey world it becomes all the more important to be able to monitor/diagnose/trace the execution and runtime behavior of your services
• Panos Astithas on "Better security and privacy for your web apps" - great security tips from a firefox guru.

and finally

• Douglas Crockford's totally inspiring closing keynote on "Numbers" - the night before I was lucky to sit almost opposite to him at the speaker's dinner in which he was mostly staying quiet; until the moment I started talking about how the Latin Alphabet originated from the Greek Alphabet, which built on top the Phoenician one, which innovated in the sense of transcribing sounds rather than symbols/ideas that was revolutionary for that time and allowed different peoples to use it and express their own native language. Apparently Douglas knows this stuff better than me, which explains to some extend his passion for programming language design. (I hope this doesn't sound Greek to you).

Comparing Voxxed Days Athens & Thessaloniki, I think the latest event felt more organized and especially technical support for the speakers was much better. On the down side, I've attended one talk at the Silk-B room and it was relative small for the number of people that wanted to get in. Also, the cinema format of Devoxx events is probably more preferable when it comes to the size of the rooms and the guaranteed good visibility for all.

Those are just minor considerations for future events, because the team and volunteers behind Voxxed Days Athens did a fantastic job organizing such a high quality event. There is a vibrant community of developers in Athens and events like this provide an excellent opportunity for people to get together, socialize and learn from the best, right there at your doorstep. I can only hope there will be more of that.


See you hopefully soon!

/Dimitris

Voxxed Thessaloniki - Recap

It's been a few days since the successful completion of the Voxxed Days conference that took place in the beautiful and historic city of Thessaloniki. Here's a quick recap.

I've had presented at a Voxxed event before,  but this time the conference had special interest for me not only because it was the first time the VoxxedDays series of events is coming to Greece, but also because I was eager to meet with the active scene of the local developer community of what we use to call the the co-capital.

The event which included three tracks was organized at the Village Cinemas Multiplex, following the very successful Devoxx format. There was an impressive lineup of 17 international speakers that attracted some 350 attendees from 11 countries. Those are impressive numbers for a first time conference.

I pretty much stayed on the Java/DevOps track, mostly centered around the theme of Microservices and CI/CD environments. My talk on WildFly and WildFly Swarm, our new toolkit for creating microservices on top of the robust WildFly runtime using best of breed Java EE and thirdparty components was also in that track. I've had great discussions on the subject with a large number of folks after the talk and during the beer session that followed the event. If you are interested to find out more you can find my slides here.

I've enjoyed the opening and closing keynotes on JDK9/Modules and Developer Careers respectively and I heard good comments about the other two Methodology/BigData and Web Development tracks.

I've also had the privilege to participate at the 8th Episode of the Devastation podcast talking about WildFly, Application Servers and Opensource software development. If you are an aspiring developer that wants to enter the magical world of opensource, I have some very practical advice for you in the podcast (as long as you understand Greek, that is).

I need to congratulate the guys at the organization and the large numbers of volunteers that helped pull this off. You guys did a magnificent job organizing a world class event, Bravo!

The problem is that you've raised the bar for subsequent events - we want more! And more we will get because VoxxedDays will be moving to Athens the coming May, so I'm looking forward to that.

Until the next time!
/Dimitris

PS
If you want to read more about VoxxedDaysThessaloniki, check out those links, too:

• Patroklos - A dream come true
• Paris - Quick Recap
• Spyros' - Impressions
• 126Kr
• Twitter #vdthess

The wait is over: WildFly v10 Final released!

I suppose this is the question most often asked from any open source project out there:

"When is the next X.Y.Z release coming out?"

Developers are eager to get their hands onto the latest and greatest not only to check out the new features but also to receive important fixes. And while most projects follow a rough roadmap, you'll find that upon reaching important milestones like major final releases where timeboxing and feature dropping is not really an option, then quality becomes the driving force.

So rather than coming up with something half-baked, we'll do whatever it takes to bring to you working and performant software, even if that means we have to delay the release by a couple of months in order to fix an additional 200+ bugs going from Candidate Release 4 (CR4) to Final. Some project managers might not like this, but most developers that will get their hands dirty using our software will certainly appreciate it. :-)


So WildFly 10 was released last Friday, January 29th and for the release itself I will simply link to the comprehensive release announcement. For the lazy ones I can list the key features here:

• Java EE7 compliance, full and web profile.
• Java 7 support discontinued, please use Java 8+.
• JMS services provided by ActiveMQ Artemis, a merger of HornetQ with Active MQ.
• Ability to edit domain configurations offline, using the CLI.
• Javascript support in Undertow with hot reloading of JS files.
• Highly Available (HA) Singleton deployments, and HA-Message Driven Beans are back.
• Message Driven Beans can be controlled as a unit in delivery groups.
• Advanced automatic sizing pooling options for SLSBs and MDBs.
• Hibernate 5 is included bringing a host of improvements.
• Powershell scripts now available for the MS Windows crowd.
• Migration operations to help migrate configuration from replaced subsystems (JBossWeb, HornetQ, JacORB)
• ...
• and a lot of other stuff, including all the cool features from WF8 & WF9.

Completing any major WildFly release is never a small feat, so I'd like to congratulate the WildFly development team and Jason Greene for leading it for the past 7 years(!), as well as extend a big Thank You to the large number of related projects (WildFly bundles more than 200 different components) and the WildFly community as a whole, for their support and dedication.

As the engineering manager of the team, I wish I could just send everyone on a much needed holiday at this point :-). However we need to focus our efforts on another major task, the completion and release of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 7 GA(or else JBoss EAP), our long term commercially supported offering, based off of WildFly 8+9+10. For those interested, existing and prospective customers, a Beta for EAP7 has already been out for a few weeks now.

Enough said, download WildFly 10 now and tell us what you think. You may also find a docker image here and there is always the option of trying out WildFly on OpenShift.

Enjoy!
/Dimitris

WildFly activity in Geneva

Geneva  is a global city, a financial and worldwide center for diplomacy. There are numerous international organizations based there, including the headquarters of the United Nations and the Red Cross. It is also the place where the Geneva Conventions were signed, for the treatment of wartime non-combatants and prisoners of war.

Geneva has also an active Java developer scene and is not too far from Neuchâtel, so I'd thought that in between release madness I should really be spending some time there spreading the word on WildFly and meeting with developers to talk about the nice things we've being working on.

And it it all started in September with a presentation at CERN on the evolution of the JBoss Application Server into WildFly. It is pretty interesting how an opensource project, the JBoss Application server founded in 1999 has managed to survive and thrive in an ever changing environment, helping developers focus on their real business problems, be productive and stop re-inventing the wheel.

The preparation for that talk had started a couple of month before after an invitation I've had received from Felix Ehm at CERN, who was one of the keynote speakers at the last DevNation in Boston. They are doing pretty cool things at CERN and they are using a lot of opensource software. If you want to learn more about that you may watch the recording from Felix's keynote speech here.

Of course, as a visitor you get a tour to some of the CERN installations which is a reason on its to own to be there, anyway, so a big thanks to both Felix Ehm and Miguel Marquina for the invitations and the hospitality.

Then last week, I've participated at Soft-Shake '15 Geneva  with a State of the Union talk on WildFly. I need to point out that WildFly 10 CR4 was released last week, and we are approaching a very important milestone, the release of WildFly 10 Final some time very soon, so I'd though I would give an overview of what you get with the latest release, which is more or less a full Java EE7 certified server with a ton of features culminated over the WF 8, 9 &10 releases, built on top on the innovative architecture introduced by AS7.

WildFly AppServer - State of the Union

See you at Devoxx.BE next at the WildFly Community BOF!

/Dimitris

WildFly v9 at Voxxed Istanbul

A quick entry to say Teşekkürler! (Thanks!) to the organizational committee and all the people at Voxxed Days Istanbul. It was a great opportunity to meet and exchange experiences and ideas with the large Java developer community in Istanbul.

For those that asked for it, here are the slides from my WildFly presentation:

WildFly v9 - State of the Union

The event coincided with the release of WildFly 9 CR1 which brings us closer to the end of this release cycle.

The main features of this release are:

• Core/Full split and Servlet-only distribution
• Front-end load balancer with mod_cluster support
• Undertow HTTP/2 & SPDY support
• Graceful shutdown (suspend(timeout) / resume)
• Switching to the JDK ORB from JacORB
• Offline CLI mode
• etc.

Check out the release notes and download it from here.

Until the next time!

/Dimitris 

Hagia Sophia (Αγία Σοφία)

Bye bye Devoxx '14 - Hello WildFly 8.2 !!!

You have probably noticed how busy we are at the WildFly / JBoss EAP team churning out releases, we barely find the time to write a quick blog entry and brag about it, so here it goes: the slides from the WildFly BOF at Devoxx 2014. Our regular (5th year in a row) rendezvous with the WildFly/JBoss community.

WildFly BOF and V9 update @ Devoxx 2014

Nine months have passed since WildFly 8.0 Final was released and it has proved itself as a reliable and performant certified Java EE7 implementation. I have had the opportunity to discuss about WildFly with many people during the conference and I was very pleased to listen to almost *zero* griping about problems and issues. It just works well for most of you and I've heard about many successful migration stories from previous JBoss version and other competing platforms.


The 3 technical things people asked for were:

1. Multitenancy, or at least access to the multitenancy feature of Hibernate.
2. Some tooling to let you shrink an installation to whatever your application requires.
3. A simplified and more traditional style (treeview) graphical console.

 So really, not much :)

Even better, just one week after the BOF and the WildFly team delivered on its promise, so WildFly 8.2 Final was released, with lots of fixes and smaller enhancements, as well as support for the latest CDI 1.2 and WebSockets 1.1 standards. It's a pretty solid release so give it try, download it or install it as an update to a WildFly 8.1 installation, or simply spin a WildFly 8.2 server in the OpenShift Cloud.

This release marks more or less the end of the WildFly 8.x series. A big thanks to the many heroes out there that contributed to the release in any shape and form (ideas, code, documentation, patches, bug reports, forum postings, articles, etc.)

Our team will move on to completing WildFly 9, the first Alpha version of which you can already download and play with.

Cheers!
/Dimitris

New books from the WildFly/EAP team

I came to believe that building infrastructure software and tools for developers is the biggest challenge for a programmer (second only to actually inventing your own programming language), exactly because your end users are not normal people but other fellow developers: intelligent geeks that are very hard to impress.

And whereas in the old days tools development was kept, to a large extend proprietary, the larger percentage of languages, tools and framework are developed nowadays in the opensource, meaning your code is out there in the open to be scrutinized. Writing bad code is less easy when hundreds of eyes are watching you and your reputation is on the line.

There is one undeniable benefit, though, in working on the development of opensource projects like the WildFly application server and it's derivative RedHat JBoss EAP: it is quite possible you will become an expert in the implementation of a set of standards (Java EE or otherwise), or a technology area or a framework that interests many others.

Combine that with a knack for explaining how things work and expressing yourself clearly in written form and what you get is an excellent book writing opportunity. An opportunity that members of the WildFly/EAP will occasionally grab.

So without further ado, I'm happy to throw a plug for two books that came out recently from WildFly/EAP team members.

Mobile and Web Messaging, by Jeff Mesnil
Advanced JAX-WS Web Services, by Alessio Soldano.

Enjoy!

/Dimitris

Devoxx '13 recap

For yet another year (4th?) I hosted at Devoxx the WildFly Community BOF, one of our regular rendezvous with the JBoss community. The Wednesday 8pm slot proved very convenient and the room was full of old and new JBoss users and a good number of JBoss people/developers attending Devoxx. I was also fortunate to have Arun Gupta in the BOF, a recent addition to the Red Hat/JBoss family who was quick to field answers to various EE7 questions that came up during the session.

To start the discussion I went through a few slides providing an update on WildFly v8 which is currently in Beta, and you can download it from here. WildFly 8 is now undergoing the last stages of completing the EE7 TCK certification effort so we are not far from a CR release. This is a very good time to download the Beta release and kick the tires to help us identify and fix any issues before the Final release goes out.

WildFly 8 brings in a number of interesting new features, including:

• Full Java EE7 support
• A new fast Web Server, called Undertow
• Reduced port usage
• Patching Infrastructure
• Audit Logging
• Role Based Administration

You can learn more about those features by taking a look at the latest recorded webinar by Jason Greene and Stuart Douglas.

Talking about new features I was pleasantly surprised by the input we've got during the BOF, which contrary to other years it wasn't that much! Meaning that we are now at a point were we have most major areas of functionality covered and we can start looking at the details or the more advanced use cases. So despite the new name, WildFly is in fact quite mature, carrying along a JBoss history of 14 years.

On the other hand, I was not surprised at all by the huge interest I've seen at Devoxx by Glassfish users for moving over to WildFly and JBoss EAP, after the announcement by Oracle earlier this month that they are stopping commercial support for Glassfish. It's kind of sad for us to loose a very much respected opponent in the opensource space, but it was bound to happen at some point. It's hard to have to deal with two competing products in the same company.

Besides the BOF, I should also mention that I held a mini session at the JBoss booth, a quick introduction to Role-Based Administration (RBAC) in WildFly. Brian Stansberry gives some information about RBAC in the 2nd installment of the WildFly Deep Dive webinar series that you can watch recorded here.


Finally, I would like to take the opportunity and thank everyone that participated in my sessions. Your suggestions are taken very seriously and they are often used to change our priorities and shape our roadmaps.

Until the next time!

/Dimitris

JBoss EAP and WildFly - a Symbiotic Relationship

It was a year ago in June/2012 when we released JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 (JBoss EAP) our stable and supported product based on the groundbreaking work performed in the community JBoss AS 7 project that pushed the envelope of application server technology and recently granted us the ZeroTurnAround Best Application Server Award.

And although for this past year our track record, in terms of community releases and vocal presence has been relatively poor, the application server team has been super busy working behind the scenes on our long term goal of strengthening the symbiotic project/product relationship. How?

In two ways:

First, by releasing JBoss EAP 6.1 on May/20th (check out the release notes) we didn't just produce yet another minor release with many important bug fixes and a number of new features. We've introduced a change in the distribution model so that starting from EAP 6.1, binaries (and sources of course) of all EAP major.minor releases are becoming immediately available through the JBossAS downloads page on jboss.org to anyone that wants to use EAP for development purposes under a $0 subscription.

So if you have a strategic interest in JBoss EAP or you are just curious to try it out, you can get involved from the very early stages of productization, including the Alpha & Beta releases, discussing about the product, reporting any issues and helping us fix issues by the time the GA release is out.

Second, by renaming the community JBoss AS project to WildFly and Jason producing the first ever WildFly 8.0.0.Alpha1 release, we didn't just embark on the Java EE7 journey implementing the latest and greatest iteration of the spec, introduce a host of great new features or strive for even better performance. We've established a cleaner separation between the community project (WildFly) and the product (JBoss EAP) and we have entered a fast paced and aggressive monthly release cycle that will hopefully lead us to a Final version by the end of the year.

So if you love the community project (with the brand new name), you want to live on the bleeding edge of technology and help us once more have fun and make history (and write a lot of code on the way), now is the right time to get involved (and who knows, I might even hire the best of you). Also, don't be mislead by the Alpha phase of the project, the quality is way higher.

WildFly and JBoss EAP march towards their common future hand-in-hand complementing each other. WildFly constantly pushing forward in terms of new features and cutting edge innovation, and JBoss EAP following with a focus on enterprise level performance and stability, long term maintenance and first class professional support.

Both are available now for download, make your pick (WildFly / JBoss EAP) and get going!

/Dimitris