Packt Survey for JBoss Books - and a discount

Packt, the folks publishing the JBoss ESB Begineers' Guide later on this month, have a new survey for JBoss users and books.

The survey is here: http://snipurl.com/21212r0

Packt is overseeing a community survey for JBoss users to find out what support they need to aid and enhance their JBoss experience. Packt want to make sure they are making the right offers to all JBoss users and are providing what they need and want.

The survey is about all of JBoss projects (Drools, AS, jBPM and more). The questions will help to provide a snapshot of how the community finds support, how they self-educate, help each other and what information they need now. As Packt think the results will be of genuine interest to the JBoss community, the results of the survey will be published.

Not only that but every JBoss user that completes the survey will receive a 25% discount off their next JBoss eBook purchase from Packt

JBoss ESB Book - in the Packt RAW Program

And, the soon-to-be-published (by Packt) JBoss ESB Beginner's Guide is now in the Packt "RAW" program - so that the book can be purchased pre-release - and chapters are provided as they are completed.

http://www.packtpub.com/jboss-esb-beginners-guide/book

The JBoss ESB Guide is on Amazon

And - the soon-to-be-published book just appeared on Amazon:

JBoss ESB Beginners Guide

JBoss ESB Beginner's Guide - Expected in November

Packt is publishing the "JBoss ESB Beginner's Guide" in November!

http://www.packtpub.com/jboss-esb-beginners-guide/book

ESB 4.10 Released

We are happy to announce the 4.10 release of JBoss ESB. It is now available for download at our project site listed below. The major features of this release are as follows:

• Support for JBoss AS 6.0.0.Final
• Drools 5.2.0
• jUDDI 3.1.0 and the inclusion of the juddiv3.war
• Scout 1.2.3
• Smooks 1.4

and numerous bug fixes.

The project site is updated with binaries and documentation:

http://jboss.org/jbossesb/downloads.html
http://jboss.org/jbossesb/docs.html

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release for your hard work!

Two JBossESB blog posts were just reposted to Dzone

And, here they are:

"From HTTP to the ESB - JBossESB 4.7's New Servlet based HTTP Gateway," http://architects.dzone.com/news/jbossesb-http-gateways

"Message Alerts in JBossESB 4.7," http://soa.dzone.com/news/messagealerts-jbossesb-47

JBoss Tools Smooks Editor - Progress...

We've been making some good progress with the JBoss Tools Smooks Editor. The following are two rough Screencasts (audio is poorly edited... apologies) illustrating two use cases that extend from each other.

EDI to Java

In this Screencast, we bind EDI Purchase Order data (but can also be XML, JSON etc) into an "Order" object model (Java). This Screencast was created a few weeks ago, using the v3.1.0.CR1 release of JBoss Tools.

• See Screencast
  

EDI to XML (via XSD)

In this Screencast, we extend the example shown in the above Screencast, applying a template to the "Order" object model to produce an XML Purchase Order. The XML Purchase Order is defined in an XML Schema (XSD), but you'll see how the editor makes it very easy to work with the XSD. This Screencast was created recently, using one of the Nightly Builds of JBoss Tools.

• See Screencast
  

Status

We are currently working towards the v3.1.0.CR2 release of JBoss Tools, which is due to be released in Feb (not sure of exact date). There are still a number of issues with the editor. We are working on these and will be resolving many of them for the 3.1.0.CR2 release.

We have purposely restricted the 3.1.0 version of the editor:

1. Supported Use Cases:
   • Java Mapping/Binding: Drag & Drop mapping/binding of XML, JSON, CSV and EDI data to Java.
   • CSV and XML Templating: Drag & Drop templating of Java Mappings (see #1 above) to produce CSV or XML (XML via XSD or XML Sample).
2. Supported Integration:
   • JBoss Tools ESB Editor: Will have basic open and edit integration with the ESB SmooksAction.
     
3. Supported Versions:
   • Smooks v1.2 Configurations: The Editor will only support Smooks v1.2 configuration namespaces. Therefore, if you have configurations using config namespaces from earlier (or newer v1.3) versions of Smooks, the editor will not open the configurations.

So, the editor will not support:

1. Direct Source to Result drag & drop templating e.g. XML to XML, EDI to XML, XML to CSV etc. We hope to support this in a future release (next one hopefully), but for now (in the v3.1.0 release), you need to define a Java Object model to use as the canonical form of the data being mapped i.e. v3.1.0 templating works as Source -> Java -> Result.
2. A number of features supported by the Smooks Runtime, such as Persistence, Validation etc. We will be adding support for these in future releases.
3. Smooks v1.1 (and before) configuration namespaces that have newer versions in Smooks v1.2. For example, Smooks v1.2 added a v1.2 javabean config namespace. It is this version of the javabean config namespace that is supported by the editor. The v1.1 javabean config namespace is not supported.
4. Smooks v1.3 (yet to be released) configuration namespaces.

Try it Out...

Please take the editor for a spin and let us know what you think. It can be downloaded (standalone, or as part of JBoss Tools) from the JBoss Tools Downloads Page. Please log any issues you find with the editor (against the "smooks" component), if not already logged.