Continuing with the audiocast series from JBoss World 2008, this is EJB3 lead developer Carlo de Wolf talking about EJB 3 for Java developers new to Enterprise JavaBeans. The audio is available in OGG Vorbis and MP3 formats. Slides from the presentation are available.
As an ongoing joint operation, this audiocast is the first that is fed into the JBoss.org podcast channel (ATOM feed.) This is fun, as it allows us to distribute not only a title and rich description, but a thumbnail image full of meaning:
Starting with this “Introduction to Seam” by Pete Muir from the 2008 Jboss World in Orlando, JBoss.org and Dev Fu are presenting original audiocasts of technical presentations from various JBoss events and presentations.
The audiocast is available in MP3 and OGG Vorbis formats. You can follow along with Pete’s presentation slides. This introduction is intended for Java developers and anyone interested in learning more about what Seam is, how it got this way, and where it is going next
This audiocast is the first of many, to be released one or two a week as we get through the editing process. That should carry us right up to the Red Hat Summit, where we seek additional relevant and interesting developer audio content.
These are the presentations from JBoss World Orlando 2008.
Updated 2008-11-16 with new URL for 2008 presentations.
As a round-up of developer related posts from JBoss World last week, here are a number of links shamelessly pulled from Red Hat blogs aggregation of feeds that included the JBoss.org feed aggregator and the Dev Fu feed. There are a few more business-flavored posts here that are also relevant for Java developers.
In his session this morning on JBoss Cache, Manik Surtani demonstrated caching and clustering via the lightweight GUI described in “Visualizing JBoss Cache.” It’s a fairly straightforward GUI that gains from it’s simplicity. He mentioned that the GUI demo was available for download, which I found here.
In the demo, Manik is using a buddy node configuration. You can read more about buddy nodes and other clustering configurations via the links in “Full cache at JBoss World“. Regarding one semantic clarification from the talk, a node is a cache instance, that is, a tree node in the data structure. This does not refer to, for example, a physical server node. One audience member who asked about the usage gave the clear language of, “A node is an object that has state in our application and that state needs to be replicated.”
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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Just completed a great session with Emmanuel Bernard on Hibernate Search. Emmanuel is engaging as a speaker, and his demonstrating adding Hibernate Search capabilities to a web store in 15, well, 17 minutes was fun and informative. We got good multimedia coverage of this one (finally!), results featured here in the near future.
Right now I’m sitting in Max Katz’s talk on Developing Rich Internet Applications with JBoss RichFaces. Similar to what I’ve seen many times in the last few days, Max is doing a live demonstration using JBoss Developer Studio (the subscription version of JBoss Tools), writing a building up an application using JSF and RichFaces. It’s great to see a roomful of attention on these tools that were open sourced by Exadel and Red Hat.
JBoss Seam developers and authors Jacob Orshalick and Michael Yuan have just released some chapters from their upcoming second edition to JBoss Seam: Simplicity and Power Beyond Java(TM) EE to coincide with JBoss World. Jacob has an announcement here with more details about the second edition, and the chapters are available here.
Michael and Jacob have written Seam articles for Dev Fu (Michael’s and Jacob’s), and I’m looking forward to doing a full review of their book when it comes out. Now I just need to find someone who understands Seam well enough to write that review. 
Keynote at JBoss World yesterday started with Jim Whitehurst, the new Red Hat President and CEO. It was his 42nd day at Red Hat, an auspicious number to many of us. He brought a fresh perspective to the subject of “making money on free software.”
In his opening, Jim went over the basics — a discussion about the community model that Red Hat and JBoss follow, where a single entity manages the two communities, enterprise/business and open source. He started by making an honest statement about what he thought when he started the new job. To paraphrase, “I thought the model with an open source community and an enterprise community was an artificial construct to make it easier to sell free software.”
In his days now at Red Hat, Jim has dived in and discovered how alive, healthy, and essential this model is to the success of everyone involved. The open source community side is healthier than ever, and enterprise and business community members are learning how to be ahead and participate in the future through being part of the open community, while being day-to-day consumers of the stable and supported. This is something developers have known for years, and it was good to have a fresh-from-the-outside person with a business focus reaffirming this.
Following Jim was middleware CTO Sacha Labourey, who picked up the same theme of wrangling the fast moving open source community into the stable enterprise community’s needs. JBoss.org keeps things going the way JBoss has always been run (“It’s free, and it doesn’t suck”), while the enterprise branches are the focus for support, services, and the business relationship. This model is continuing to work well, with the actual numbers of community-based downloads increasing (20 million+) and the overall organization is growing.
Another point Sacha raised was the importance of the newer business unit structure of Red Hat. This may not seem important to developers on the face of it, but Sacha is right: the separate middleware business makes it clear that this community and product line is an important part of the Red Hat future. The middleware group now has the autonomy to work as they need, while still remaining part of the same great product family.
Sacha finished off his portion of the keynotes by bringing several project leads on stage to do actual product demonstrations. This was a nice element to add for a developer conference. It gave these leads another chance to make their voices heard, and it was a good demonstration of how well the products work together. Max Rydahl Andersen showed how easy it is to modify and deploy from within JBoss Developer Studio. Julian Viet demo’d Max’s web page pulled into JBoss Portal. At the end, Mark LIttle came up to show how this fits into the overall SOA. Throughout the demo, the A/V system gave Sacha challenges, but he handled it with aplomb and never lost the audience. After all, what better audience to witness everything going well with the code while the supporting system has fits?
Finishing off the afternoon with Microcontainer meets OSGi while running the full audio record for Introduction to JBoss Seam. Since I have to choose each hour what to record, and have to be there at the start of the session to plug in to the sound board and capture it all, there isn’t much chance to modify the recording schedule on the fly. For that reason, I have mixed introduction sessions with advanced sessions. The sessions are think and rich, so there is enough gravy to spread around for everyone.
This session has a good set of slides, so although we aren’t getting audio from it, you can get a lot of value from reading those, which are available after the show on jbossworld.com. So far I’ve seen useful lists and code samples, and now details of OSGi integration. You can read some background in this JBoss.org interview with Ales Justin. The project pages have more information, as do the product pages if you are looking for a subscription for the whole solution.
