JBossWorld Boston 2012 Wednesday

AeroGear: The Gear You Need to Go Mobile with Red Hat
Jay Balunas, Aero Gear's project lead gave a talk focused on another hot topic this week - how to convert existing and deliver new applications to mobile devices.  Tablets and smart phones are now outselling PC's so the importance of this area cannot be under-estimated, everything has to be delivered through multiple channels.  Mobile devices present a seemingly endless list of challenges - there are a wide range of operating systems, multiple versions of operating systems, native code, interpreted code, the performance impact of network bandwidth, security, testing....  The Aero Gear project is starting to address these issues and standardise an approach enabling rapid development and testing of mobile applications.  Demo apps can be found on the Aero Gear home page including details on creating JSF, HTML5 & Rest, Hybrid (for example using Apache Cordova) and Native mobile apps, good stuff.


JBoss Operations Network Provisioning
This was a hands on sample of JBoss Operations Network training, specifically two labs on bundle provisioning.  JBossON can provision any type of resource to groups of resources contained within its inventory.  Resources could be application deployments, configuration files or even entire server installations - it doesn't really matter.  On reflection having done implementations and Proof of Concepts for customers using this technology with RHQ I should have probably attended a different session.  Nevermind, it was a useful recap anyway!


JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 - Ease into the Cloud
This session presented by Jason Greene and Rich Sharples gave an overview of JBoss EAP 6 with some technical information on the new domain and standalone operation modes, improved performance and the new management tooling.  There were some good points raised by the audience at the end including

Is JBossAS7 7.1.1 going to be the final community release or will patches and enhancement be pushed back into the community version?  The response wasn't definitive - EAP 6 will likely go through several more release cycles with the initial releases being trialed on a possible AS 7.2 and 7.3 before forming part of the supported version.  I guess time will tell if the community product is stable enough (and sufficiently patched) to compete with EAP as a viable enterprise server.

How come the domain management console is incomplete, many metrics and configuration options are unavailable at the moment?  And also the console appears to lack some "truly" domain management functionality such as session bleed down.

The response was that these features are on the plan but they missed the cut for the first release, for the time being you can access all functionality through the new command line and RESTful interfaces but the console is still some way off completion.  In my opinion the console is still far too far behind some of JBoss' competitors, its a good start and definitely going in the right direction but there's a long way to go.  Most of the domain management use-cases can be covered off by management using alternative approaches to just the console, but for the time being at least its not going to be as easy as clicking a button in the console.

Mark Addy