Unfortunately a hiccup with SourceForge has meant that Seam and Web Beans downloads are currently unavailable - please bear with us while we sort it out.

In the meantime, I've put the latest releases of Seam and Web Beans up on another server:

• Web Beans 1.0.0.PREVIEW1
• Seam 2.1.2.GA (watch this space)
• Seam 2.2.0.CR1 (watch this space)

The Java Connector Architecture (JCA) defines a standard architecture for connecting the Java EE platform to heterogeneous Enterprise Information Systems (EIS).

The goal of the JBoss JCA project is to provide an implementation of the Java Connector Architecture 1.6 (JSR-322) specification scheduled for inclusion in the upcoming Java Enterprise Edition 6 platform.

What's New ?

Among the changes are

• Ease of Development: The use of annotations reduces or completely eliminates the need to deal with a deployment descriptor in many cases. The use of annotations also reduces the need to keep the deployment descriptor synchronized with changes to source code.
• Generic work context contract: A generic contract that enables a resource adapter to control the execution context of a Work instance that it has submitted to the application server for execution.
• Security work context: A standard contract that enables a resource adapter to establish security information while submiting a Work instance for execution to a WorkManager and while delivering messages to message endpoints residing in the application server.
• Standalone Container Environment: A defined set of services that makes up a standalone execution environment for resource adapters.

Why should I care ?

If you are using the JBoss Application Server (and of course you are, right ?) for your deployments you depend on the JCA layer to give you access to your external datasources such as databases, messaging and mail systems.

Furthermore the JDBC resource adapter deployed within JBoss Application Server provides you with a connection and prepared statement pool which gives your application a performance boost.

So the JCA layer is actually quite important, so you should care :)

Enter JBoss JCA

The JBoss JCA project will implement the JCA 1.6 specification using a POJO based model and using the JBoss Microcontainer as its foundation.

The POJO based model will allow

• Easy integration with other projects
• Multiple flavors (Running inside an application server, Standalone container, Embedded container)
• Looser coupling of services

I'll discuss these and other features in more details in future releases.

As this is the first alpha release it is of course not feature complete nor production ready. The release is meant as a developer snapshot that will give an indication of where we are heading.

If you are interested in helping out with the project in any way drop by our forum ! Or download the specification and post your comments to the expert group so your voice is heard.

For Those About to Rock, We Salute You !

[Website] [Download] [JIRA] [Forum]

The Seam team is happy to report that Seam 2.2.0.CR1 is now out. This release gives us a chance to upgrade Seam to the latest versions of a few libraries that are core to Seam. These changes were big enough to warrant bumping minor version numbers.

The largest is a bump to the entire Hibernate family of APIs - core 3.3.1, tools 3.2.4, entitymanager 3.4.0, annotations 3.4.0 and search 3.1.1. We've also moved our Drools support from Drools 4 to Drools 5. If the great new features of Drools 5 weren't enough, we've added a few new features to the drools integration: decision table support, Seam components as consequence exception handlers and Seam components as Drools event listeners.

Finally, we've put in some serious work towards making Seam work better for applications that deploy over multiple WAR files. If that's something you've been having issues with, we definitely recommend that you give Seam 2.2 a try.

As always, please ask questions in the forums and open issues in JIRA for confirmed bugs.

[Download] [Documentation] [Release Notes]

Just got done releasing 3.3.2 with tons of fixes/enhancements/improvements including some much needed documentation updates and again building translated docs.

Next we start focusing on 3.5 and implementing JPA 2 support...

A quick release after last month Beta4 release, but it doesn't mean that JBoss Profiler 2.0.0.Beta5 doesn't have new features.

Along with the normal bug fixes and improvements this release has two cool features that you should check out.

Embedded mode

The profiler distribution now ships with a

jboss-profiler-embedded.jar

file, which contains both the agent and the client API.

This will make it easy to integrate JBoss Profiler into your own project, and control when profiling should be done.

Feedback on this feature would be great so I can get an idea of what you would like to see in this space.

Precompiler

The distribution now also ships with a precompiler, which is able to precompile all your JAR files with profiler call-backs. This will allow you to

1. Faster startup
2. Easier to swap out JAR files that you have profiled

Making it a lot easier to profile large applications or platforms.

The precompiler uses the same option style as the agent for its arguments

java -Xmx1024m -jar jboss-profiler-precompiler.jar com.mycompany.* com.mycompany.highperformance.*,* private ~/myapplication

You can read more about the precompiler in the users guide.

The road ahead

Still a lot to do - and I'm still looking for people that wants to help out with

• JVMTI/HPROF backend
• JSF/RichFaces web ui
• Documentation and examples
• Your ideas of course !

So feel free to drop by our forum :)

For Those About to Rock, We Salute You !

[Website] [Download] [Forum]