JUDCon Boston 2012 Day Two

Back for another day, they even have bagels for breakfast :)

JBoss Forge: Productivity, Reliability, and Testability in an Enterprise Environment

This was a really good talk and demo from project lead Lincoln Baxter III.  JBoss Forge is a command line / shell based rapid application development tool.  It can be run standalone or integrated into your favourite IDE.  You can use to automate tasks, generate tests and rapidly build a working, if a little basic enterprise application.  Sort of like a maven archetype but taking you a step further and providing the ability to generate and deploy some real (and working) code which can then be customised for your own use-case.  Its not tied to a framework, in fact the range of functionality is limited only by the number of available plugins - and of course there is a framework to develop your own plugins.  The demo showed how a JSF application with JPA persistence could be created, configured, customer, built and deployed to a JBossAS7 instance in a matter of minutes.  Quite impressive.

There are other tools out there so you might want to take a look at Spring Roo and Play! if this is an area you are looking into.

A common theme with the presentations so far has been inclusion and pushing of OpenShift so it wasn't a surprise that Forge has a plugin capable of deploying to the JBoss opensource cloud.

Enterprise Services Made Easy with SwitchYard

Another SwitchYard presentation and demo - you can't fail to be impressed with the tooling that comes with this new ESB offering from JBoss.  In this talk we saw how the logic to perform validation and transformations can be externalized to service logic with the container injecting this functionality at run-time.

Testing of SwitchYard services has also been simplified in comparison to JBossESB, the new tooling can autogenerate JUnit test classes that run with a SwitchYardRunner responsible for bootstrapping the ESB container.

And the evening saw the commencement of Redhat Summit / JBossWorld and the opening keynotes - which was quite something.  Perhaps a little bit over the top, at least for me anyway.  Booming music, rock concert lighting, at least there was no dry ice and I didn't see anyone holding a lighter in the air.  Still I felt I had to take a photo but it really doesn't capture the ambience...

Mark Addy