Getting started with SwitchYard 2.0.0.Alpha1 on WildFly 8.1.0.Final

I've been sticking my head into some hot RedHat technologies lately and among the many interesting parts I found SwitchYard. Without being disrespectful towards everybody wrapping their heads around SOA and service oriented architectures in the past, this has always been kind of weird to me as a Java EE developer.

In the past I've been building component oriented applications with what I had at hand. Mostly driven by the features available in the Java EE standard to be "portable" and easy to use. Looking back this has been a perfect fit for many customers and applications. With an increasing demand for highly integrated applications which use already available services and processes from all over the place (departmental, central or even cloud services) this approach starts to feel more and more outdated. And this feel does not come from a technology perspective but from all the requirements around it. Having this in mind this post is the starting point of a series of how-to's and short tutorials which aim to showcase some more diverse ways of building (Java EE) applications that fit better into today's requirements and landscapes.

What is SwitchYard?
It is a component-based development framework for integration applications using the design principles and best practices of Service Oriented Architecture. If you're expecting kind of a full-blown fancy BPMN/SOA buzz-word suite you're off by a bit. This is for developers and should make it comparably straight forward to use. It's been around for a while now and starting with latest 2.0.0.Alpha1 it is compatible with WildFly 8. Reasons enough for me to get you excited about it.

Installing SwitchYard into latest WildFly 8.1.0.Final
Download both, the switchyard-2.0.0.Alpha1-wildfly bundle and WildFly 8.1.0.Final from the project websites. Install WildFly 8 by unzipping it into a folder of your choice (e.g. D:\wildfly-8.1.0.Final\). Now unzip the SwitchYard bundle into the WildFly folder. Depending on the zip utility in use, you may be prompted whether existing files should be replaced.  Answer yes/all for all files being unzipped.
It's an alpha so you have to tweak the configuration a bit because of SWITCHYARD-2158. Open "JBOSS_HOME/standalone/configuration/standalone.xml" and search for "org.switchyard.component.camel.atom.deploy.CamelRSSComponent" and change the package from "atom" to "rss". Now go ahead and start the server with "JBOSS_HOME/bin/standalone.sh/.bat".
If everything worked correctly you should see a message like this:

09:18:25,857 INFO  [org.jboss.as] (Controller Boot Thread) JBAS015874: WildFly 8.1.0.Final "Kenny" started in 3712ms - Started 210 of 259 services (81 services are lazy, passive or on-demand)

Building and Deploying the Bean Service Quickstart
If you want to get your hands dirty you can easily start with the packaged applications in the "JBOSS_HOME/quickstarts/" directory of the distribution. A simple one is the bean-service example. It makes use of one of the core components of SwitchYard, the Bean Component. It allows Java classes (or beans) to provide and consume services. And therefore you can implement a service by simply annotating a Java class or consume one by injecting a reference directly into your Java class.
And because the Bean Component is a standard CDI Extension, there is no need to learn a new programming model to use it. It's just a standard CDI Bean with a few more annotations.
For existing Java EE applications this means, that you can expose existing CDI-based beans in your application as services to the outside world or consume services within your bean by just adding some more annotations.
First things first. We need to tweak around a bit in the project pom.xml to make this work. Go to the build section and replace the "jboss-as-maven-plugin" with the latest version of the

<groupId>org.wildfly.plugins</groupId>
<artifactId>wildfly-maven-plugin</artifactId>
<version>1.0.2.Final</version>

Now run "mvn package" to download all dependencies and execute the tests. It should just work fine and state:

Tests run: 6, Failures: 0, Errors: 0, Skipped: 0

Let's deploy it to our WildFly instance by issuing "mvn -Pdeploy install". The WildFly console finally lets you know about the successful execution:

10:19:44,636 INFO  [org.jboss.as.server] (management-handler-thread - 1) JBAS018559: Deployed "switchyard-bean-service.jar" (runtime-name : "switchyard-bean-service.jar")

Quick Test For The Application
A very quick test is to execute mvn exec:java which will execute the BeanClient class and fire a SOAP request towards the deployed service. The output should be:

SOAP Reply:
<soap:envelope xmlns:soap="http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope"><env:header xmlns:env="http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope"></env:header><soap:body><ord ers:submitorderresponse="" xmlns:orders="urn:switchyard-quickstart:bean-service:1.0
"><orderack><orderid>PO-19838-XYZ</orderid><accepted>true</accepted><status>Orde
r Accepted [intercepted]</status></orderack></ord></soap:body></soap:envelope>

That is it for today. The next parts will examine the sample application in a bit more detail and install the tooling and introduce you to various other components. If you can't wait, check out:

• the SwitchYard Documentation which contains a whole bunch of useful stuff.
• some awesome videos and learn all about SwitchYard in our new SwitchYard Video Series.
• the other Quickstart applications.  

Win a free eBook copy of WildFly Performance Tuning

This is a seriously good start into a new area. I thought you might be interested in winning Packt's latest book about WildFly Performance Tuning. So, this is the contest to make it happen.
I have 2 eBook copies of WildFly Performance Tuning to be given away to two (2) lucky winners.

Here are the Rules
- The contest is running from today (07/09/14, 5:45a UTC) to next Wednesday (07/16/14, 5:45a UTC).
- Answer the three questions below correctly about WildFly and put down a comment on this blog with the answers.
- If more than three correct answers are posted, I will let my daughters draw the two winners.

The Questions to Answer
1) When was WildFly 8.1.0.Final released?
2) What is the name of the Red Hat project, that offers help with Java EE application migration?
3) Who wrote the WildFly Plugin for NetBeans 8?

Content of the Book
Chapter 1, The Science of Performance Tuning, talks about what performance tuning is all about and how it can be applied within an organization.
Chapter 2, Tools of the Tuning Trade, introduces some useful Open Source tools to use when performance tuning anything covered in this book.
Chapter 3, Tuning the Java Virtual Machine, covers what the engine of Java is and how to tune it as well as all other Java-based applications.
Chapter 4, Tuning WildFly, explains what can be tuned in the WildFly
Application Server.
Chapter 5, EJB Tuning in WildFly, talks about how Enterprise JavaBeans can be tuned.
Chapter 6, Tuning the Persistence Layer, covers how to design an effective database as well as how to tune JPA and queries.
Chapter 7, Tuning the Web Container in WildFly, explores Undertow—the blazingly fast, new web container in WildFly—and discusses how it can be tuned to become even better.
Chapter 8, Tuning Web Applications and Services, covers numerous tuning tricks and tips surrounding the web applications and services based on Java EE.
Chapter 9, JMS and HornetQ, explains how JMS works and can be tuned in HornetQ, the JMS provider of WildFly.
Chapter 10, WildFly Clustering, explores tuning in a clustered WildFly, HornetQ, and Java EE components.

About the Author
Anders Welén embraced the object-oriented techniques of the Java language early in life, and later evolved to Java Enterprise specifications. As a true believer and evangelist of Open Source, he naturally discovered the JBoss Application Server,
which led to years of providing expert consultation, training, and support for the JBoss and Java EE infrastructures.

Good Luck everybody!

Farewell msg systems ...

.. and thank you for amazing 14 years. It's true: I've been within the msg group for an incredibly long time  and have been working in the Java/Java EE space almost all of it. Next Friday (07/11/14) will be my last day. Now it is time to move on.
I've been working with customers and internal Java EE projects all over the place, blogged, authored articles and have been speaking at conferences a lot. The passion for Java and mostly Java EE related topics is burning even hotter these days.

I'm more than proud to announce that as of calendar week 29 (7/14/14), I'll be joining Red Hat as Developer Advocate in Arun Gupta's team.
My main topics are technologies related to Red Hat JBoss Middleware including WildFly and the broader JBoss technology stack. So, I will be blogging, speaking and spreading the word about the most important and relevant parts in today's Enterprise Java world. There's no need to be afraid of this blog turning into a sales slide-deck. As you're used to, I'll mostly stick to technology and conference reports. So you don't even have to update your bookmarks as this blog is here to stay.

So, if you have ideas, requests, wishes or if you're just hungry for something new, just give me a ping on @myfear or leave a comment in this blog and I'll be more than happy to respond. Just reach out to me.

Arun and Markus at JavaLand 2014

"Mad Matter: "Have I gone mad?"
Alice: "I'm afraid so. You're entirely bonkers. But I'll tell you a secret. All the best people are.”
Lewis Caroll, Alice no País das Maravilhas

Java EE 8 - Deliver More Apps to More Devices

If there's one thing I dislike about summer, it is the fact that there isn't much news to share or talk about. Who ever decided to put the Java Day Tokyo into this boring time of the year did a pretty good job and gave me an opportunity to write a blog post about new and upcoming Java EE 8 specification enriched with some more thoughts and pointers.
As announced on the Java EE 7 EG Mailinglist beginning of June the new EE 8 JSR is going to be filed shortly (before JavaOne).

Contents of EE 8
Unlike the first version of EE 7 which was totally dominated by the word "cloud" and later re-aligned with the hard facts, this new Java EE version will basically stick to three different areas of improvement.

• HTML 5 / Web Tier Enhancements
• CDI Alignment / Ease-of-Development
• Cloud Enablement

All three can be seen as a continued evolution of what EE 7 already delivered and there is no real surprise in it at all. Head over to The Aquarium to read more about the details.

Cameron Purdy about EE 8 at Java Day Tokyo 2014

Hidden Gems - What might come up at JavaOne

The Java Day Tokyo was held recently and with Cameron Purdy as a keynote speaker about Java EE and it's general direction (mp4 download, 363MB) this probably was one of the first chances to see, what will be the overall story for JavaOne with regards to the platform. As Oracle should have learned the Java community isn't interested in big and unpleasant surprises. Strategic directions are communicated and prepared a bit more carefully. We all have seen and heard about the IoT hype and the efforts everybody puts in it. This obviously also seems to have some outreach into Java EE. Beside the general topics and contents of EE 8 the Purdy keynote also contained a slide titled "Powering Java Standard in the Cloud - Deliver Mode Apps to More Devices with Confidence". 

Java Standards in the Cloud.

And yes, you are correct about thinking that this is EE 7 coverage. It actually is. But at least for me it is the first time, that individual features have been isolated from individual technical specifications and put into a complete, strategic picture outlining use-cases in the enterprise. It will be interesting to see, if there is something more like this to be shown at JavaOne and how much IoT we will see in EE 8 when it finally hits the road.

I'm speaking at JavaOne 2014, September 28 to October 2, 2014 in San Francisco, California, USA

Just a short 104 days to go until the number one Java event is going to happen again. JavaOne opens it's doors again beginning 28th of September till the 2nd of October this year. After intense months of work in the program committee for both the Server-side Java and the Java in the Cloud track, where we dug through all the proposals the final program has been selected and the notifications have been send out.

And I am proud to contribute again this year. After the intense event last year, this is going to be a bit more relaxed with only one session.

Session ID: CON1747
Session Title: JavaScript in the Enterprise
Session Abstract: Instead of exclusively using JavaScript on front-ends what else can be done with it on Java EE servers? Looking into Nashorn, Avatar, Scripting JSR and other possible options of also using JavaScript as an enterprise workhorse.

Beside this I am going to contribute to the NetBeans day and moderate the "Free Java Tools for Maven and Java EE" panel.

There'll be tons of amazing sessions in the content catalog and if you haven't you should register today!