JBoss Tools 3.1 has been released by the JBoss team and is available for installation into Eclipse 3.5.

JBoss Tools is a set of Eclipse plugins for JBoss and related technologies such as JBoss App Server, Seam, Hibernate or JBoss BPEL. Version 3.1 of JBoss Tools targets Eclipse 3.5 and can be installed into Eclipse from the update site at:

http://download.jboss.org/jbosstools/updates/stable/galileo

The final release of JBoss Tools 3.1 provides many new features such as support for JBoss EAP 5.x and JBoss AS 6M1. A full list of new features can be found here.

London, UK, 22nd February, 2010 – Paremus, the pioneer of OSGiTM-based cloud computing, today announced a partnership with Real-Time Innovations (RTI), the Real-Time Middleware Experts.  RTI is the industry leader in middleware compliant with the Data Distribution Service for Real-Time Systems (DDS) standard from the Object Management Group (OMG).

The Paremus Service Fabric will incorporate DDS to provide a low-latency messaging substrate for resource discovery, OSGi Alliance-compliant remote service discovery and low-latency monitoring. Initial integration work is already completed, and an RTI Data Distribution Service-powered version of the Paremus Service Fabric will be available in the second half of 2010.

Paremus Service Fabric customers and solutions providers will also have the option to leverage RTI’s low-latency messaging for their own high-performance applications. “Taking the financial services industry as an example,” said Mike Francis, Paremus Sales & Marketing Director, “customers can use the Service Fabric to address applications ranging from low-latency, front-office real-time pricing to high-throughput, elastic middle and back-office trade processing pipelines.”

Stan Schneider, RTI’s CEO, noted, “The application demands on cloud platforms are pushing performance and scalability in Enterprise environments to new limits. We are very pleased that Paremus has recognised the proven capability of our peer-to-peer messaging middleware to meet these new requirements. By further integrating our resource discovery technology into its OSGi platform, Paremus is able to deliver a far more flexible and dynamic PaaS environment.”

The Paremus Service Fabric supports a wide variety of business processing patterns and enables organisations’ software development teams to realise the component reuse and time-to-market efficiencies offered by OSGi. The model-driven runtime dramatically simplifies operational management while providing resilience and elasticity well beyond that of any Java EE application server, compute grid or ESB-centric solution, including the latest OSGi/SCA-enabled variants.

“Key to Paremus’ technology leadership is our continued focus on technology fundamentals rather than fashions,” said Richard Nicholson, Paremus Founder & CEO. “Our recently released Nimble ‘Making Modularity Manageable’ OSGi kernel is a simple and elegant solution that enables the power of OSGi to be harnessed by the modern enterprise. Likewise, the fundamentals of the OMG DDS standard and the quality of the RTI implementation made it the clear choice for the next generation of Service Fabric’s low-latency, high-throughput messaging substrate.” Nicholson concluded, “Robustness, manageability, scalability and agility are interlinked concerns, and these cannot be truly addressed without addressing the basics; technologies like Nimble and our partnership with RTI for DDS address these fundamentals and will continue to differentiate the Paremus Service Fabric—a distributed OSGi runtime like no other.”

Parties interested in the beta program for the RTI Data Distribution Service-powered version of the Paremus Service Fabric can request information via an e-mail to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Packt is pleased to announce a new book, Apache MyFaces Trinidad 1.2: A Practical Guide that helps Java developers, develop JSF web applications using Trinidad and Seam. Written by David Thomas, this book will help developers strengthen their understanding of all the major concepts through a step-by-step approach.

Apache MyFaces Trinidad is a powerful JSF component framework that includes a large, enterprise quality component library which supports critical features such as accessibility and right-to-left languages. It also includes features such as integrated client-side validation as well as a dialog framework. Trinidad is more than just a component library because it also contains additional features which solve common development challenges.

Apache MyFaces Trinidad 1.2: A Practical Guide, will help developers combine Apache MyFaces Trinidad with Seam in-order to develop rich-client web applications. They will gain a comprehensive understanding of how to implement login, authorization, navigation, internationalization, polling, and support for browser issues with the help of these technologies.

By using this book, users will be able to develop a web application that illustrates all the standard UI types covered by Trinidad. They will learn occurring tag attributes, and will gain a complete understanding of Trinidad's AJAX technology and its partial page rendering technique. By the end of the book, they would be well-versed with all the major concepts of Trinidad.

Java developers who are beginners at JSF and experienced web developers who are looking for an introduction into the world of open source JSF technology will find this book an interesting and beneficial read. This book is out now and available from Packt. For more information, please visit: www.packtpub.com/apache-myfaces-trinidad-1-2-a-practical-guide/book

JBoss RichFaces 3.3 by Demetrio Filocamo is almost 300 pages long and aims to teach developers how to using RichFaces applications rather than just providing a set of API references.

The book is broadly split into 3 sections.

The first section provides an introduction to RichFaces. An overview and history of RichFaces is provided in chapter 1 followed by a discussion on the features available with RichFaces such as AJAX functionality and skinnability. Chapter 2 of the book provides details on how to start using RichFaces within your applications. Initially, explaining how seamgen can be downloaded and installed provides this. Seamgen is a set of build scripts that are provided with JBoss Seam distributions which create ANT scripts to build, test and deploy Seam applications. If you are not using Seam, the next section of this chapter shows how to integrate RichFaces into standard JSF applications.

I found the content informative, but felt that prior knowledge of Seam would be useful in understanding what is being explained. Finally in this section, the author provides details of Eclipse/JBoss Tools, JBoss Developer Studio and IntelliJ Idea showing where to get each piece of software. I found it strange that no mention of NetBeans was provided here. Admittedly, the support for Seam projects is superior in Eclipse to NetBeans, but NetBeans provides solid JSF/RichFaces support for non-Seam projects.

The next section of the book takes the user through developing a fully blown application using RichFaces and Seam. Again, I felt that prior knowledge of Seam would be useful. During this section, the author shows how to build a working “Contact Manager” application. The application is built from scratch using seamgen as the build system. The author explains the structure of seamgen created projects and shows how many different RichFaces components can be used to create a fully functional AJAX web application. With each form that is created for the application, the web code (facelets) is shown together with the corresponding Seam components acting as JSF backing beans. This is by far the biggest section of the book and provides lot of detail on RichFaces. Sections on skinning, internationalization, user registration and displaying data lists are all provided in detail with particular reference to RichFaces. Where relevant, each of these sections shows how AJAX functionality (provided by default by RichFaces) can easily be employed to enhance the users experience.

The final section of the book shows how some of the more advanced features of RichFaces can be used. Chapters 8 and 9 show how RichFaces skins can be customized and how Maven can be used to create new skins using the RichFaces CDK. The final 2 chapters of the book show how new components can be developed with the RichFaces CDK (a star rating component is created) and how some of the more advanced AJAX components (push and pull) can be used within web applications.

Altogether this is a good book on RichFaces, but it does assume that the reader has some knowledge of developing enterprise applications and in particular I feel that prior knowledge of JBoss Seam would be greatly beneficial to reading the book. This book is recommended for web application developers using JBoss RichFaces.

Thanks to Packt Publishing for providing me the copy of this book to review.