It’s been a good few weeks for stories and information about JBoss Rules and Drools, the open source project upstream of the JBoss subscription offering. Here is a quick summary of the recent stories. Post a comment if you know of any others we all should pay attention to.
With so many Java developers enjoying their Mac OS X machines, JBoss Developer Studio is now available for Mac OS X. Product Manager Bryan Che writes:
… now you can get all the benefits of fantastic certified tools and an integrated JBoss Enterprise Application Platform with native Mac support. Many JBoss developers use Macs, and we know that many in our community use Macs, so we’re excited to make this available. And, of course, if you’re a Windows or Linux user, JBoss Developer Studio has been available for those platforms as well.
Bryan also explains why this release only supports Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.x until the next update:
… due to an issue in Eclipse, we are only supporting JBoss Developer Studio on Mac OS Tiger 10.4.x and earlier right now. There is a workaround available for Leopard, but this isn’t a supported configuration. We’ll add formal Leopard support in our next update.
RichFaces 3.2.0.GA is out, requiring JSF 1.2 and JDK 5.0 or above. A demo of new components is available, and the announcement includes a list of the new components, including Combo Box, Progress Bar, File Upload, and Pick List. Enhancements include DataTable Sorting, DataTable Filter, and standard component skinning.
The candidate release 2 of the JBoss Portlet Container project is available. This completes the first milestone for JBoss Portal 2.7, as Project Lead Julien Viet details. Following this, the 2.7 work is focused on integrating the controller module of the JBoss Portlet Container and providing a “JSR 286 Portlet runtime meta data overview through the administration portlet.” The project’s main JIRA page has a roadmap for 2.7.
In reference to the Portlet CR2, Julien writes:
Since the candidate release 1 we added an administration portlet that can manage the life cycle of the deployed applications and containers.
We have also added a very useful event debugger that can help developers to understand the event flow distributed among the different portlets during the interactions an event phase.
Mark Proctor at JBoss World on video talking about how Drools/JBoss Rules fits in to the SOA infrastructure handling business logic. While covering a lot of basics and ground, Mark provides a vision of a fully integrated and tooled platform that includes authoring, service side management, deployment, and a runtime:
Download this video: [Ogg Theora]
(Updated to include more details about the JBoss Portal 2.7 status.)
The release announcement has a full list of resolved issues that includes the bugs fixed and feature enhancements fulfilled.
Thanks to Mark Proctor for this view inside of a JBoss developer support ticket for Drools.
I thought I would share with our readers a thread from our priority support system. It’s an interesting thread as it covers some complex constraint problems in good detail, which I think most rules users might find interesting, and it also demonstrates the level of support we provide to our priority customers. This conversation is printed “as is” with only the user and customer names removed.
Ironically, it’s not always easy to get a view into these type of interactions. Red Hat Knowledgebase has what might be called distilled results of customer interactions. Yet development support is different: there is a greater value in the conversation, and thus a greater value to other knowledge seekers. How much value?
Where knowledge is freely shared, everyone gains. Sure, there is an obvious bump for Drools, but all users of this open source software get value when we show each other how to better use it. We seek answers in various forums because another person may have encountered a similar situation. Contributing to that knowledge stream helps it become more useful to all contributors and users, who are us. Why not have a developer support ticket work as an extension of an open collaboration methodology?
The next time you need an answer, maybe it is available from a knowledgebase, via web search, or on the JBoss forums. If not, having developer support is one option, and perhaps the answers you receive might be useful to others in the community. If you write about it, drop me a message or tag it in del.icio.us (dev.fu feed) with the tag “for:dev.fu“.
How do open source tools break out from the pack when it comes to solving real problems for real developers? The answer is in the open source development model and how a subscription and support model comes from that. One gives you a chance to participate in the spectrum of observer/user to contributor, the other lets you benefit from the collective fruits of everyone’s labor in a product that can make your CIO and IT managers happy for many supported years.
To illustrate, let’s discuss a bit about JBoss Drools. Being a more recent introduction into the stable of JBoss.org projects, with the first beta posted on jboss.org in March of 2006, Drools is a project that is producing code at the leading edge of rules engines. At the same time, it is managed as a stable product you can get a subscription to. This makes it easy for turning your skunkworks idea into the next-generation deployment. You can use it as part of a JBoss Enterprise Middleware deployment, or in any Jave EE middleware platform. Once the business logic is in the rules, they are reusable across your SOA. Useful for your business users and technical developers.
To learn more about Drools, take a look at the good technical content in the Drools team blog. There is documentation and you might want to try a quick start approach. We’ve got some good audio and video content from JBoss World about Drools, which is somewhere in the queue of post-production to-do-land. I’ll post about it as soon as it is ready.
This morning I attended Thomas Huete’s introduction to JBoss Portal while capturing the full audio of Mark Proctor giving an Introduction to JBoss Drools and the Business Rules Management System (BRMS). Then before the morning break I sat in and captured Introduction to Web Services by Heiko Braun.
In general, the sessions continue to follow a similar format. Full room, interested attendees, and questions regarding their real world situations. Lot’s of usage of JBoss Tools/JBoss Developer Studio for demonstrations. Speakers who really know their subject material, pulling together really great presentations, with real learning. Let’s not talk about the technical difficulties, m’kay?
During Heiko’s talk on web services, I took some notes that I’ll post here. (Any mistakes are my error or ignorance.) Later, when the audio and slides are available, this session will be one of a handful that we post the full audio. I’m very interested in how useful these full audio sessions are to you all. For one thing, that helps me in planning for future JBoss Worlds, knowing what you are interested in and what to skip.
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