Hibernate 3.6.0.Beta4 has been released incorporating mostly minor bugfixes and improvements. Most of the work this cycle went into the improved documentation. For those not aware we are planning on splitting the documentation into 2 books:

1. a Getting Started Guide, see HHH-5441 : this is a collection of tutorials and information on the Hibernate community, etc.
2. a Developer Guide, see HHH-5466 : this is essentially the information from the existing manual, but presented in a more topical fashion.

The Getting Started Guide is mostly done. There is a single subtask outstanding to incorporate a tutorial on basic Envers usage, but it already contains tutorials on basic Hibernate using (both with hbm.xml and annotation usage) as well as a basic JPA usage tutorial. They all build on the same schema and domain classes, in hopes it will be useful illustrating how to move from one paradigm to another. In fact they all perform the exact same steps for illustration (except for the Envers tutorial when it gets done, since it need to present a very different use case to usefully show Envers usage).

We also are trying out actually bundling up the tutorials in a working project this time (a maven mutli-module project) to make it even easier to get up and running with the tutorials. We are still working through the details of hosting that in terms of referencing the zip from the tutorials (thats the problem with modularizing stuff). Anyway, in the interm I thought this one was close enough that I went ahead and made it available from http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3636512/getting-started-guide/index.html. Some notes:

• This url is only made available temporarily
• The documentation references a link to obtain the code. That link is not accurate. We are still deciding where these will live and how they will be referenced. In the meantime I have zipped up the code and made it available here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3636512/getting-started-guide/tutorials.tar.gz (again temporarily).

See http://hibernate.org/downloads.html for details on obtaining the release. Or try http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3636512/getting-started-guide/index.html#hibernate-gsg-obtain ;)

Please report any issues to JIRA. Visit us on IRC or the forums if you have usage questions.

The RichFaces team has just released 4.0.0.M2, and we are one more milestone closer to the Final. This is our second monthly milestone release, with new components, bug fixes, and other updates. We also worked hard to stabilize the core, CDK, build system, and previously migrated components.

You can download the distribution at our RichFaces download page. The RichFaces-4.0.0.M2 distribution has everything you need to get started. Check out the readme.txt files for any details, or dependencies. If you are a maven user you can follow the instructions here: How to add RichFaces 4.X to Maven Based Project. Note that with the build updates some of the maven information has changed.

Some notable updates:

• New components: accordion, autocomplete, inplaceInput, and inputNumberSlider
• Large scale stabilization to our core and CDK modules.
• Finalized and updated our build structure to make it easier to download, update, and contribute.
• The RichFaces Showcase Demo has been updated with all the M1, and M2 components, and now provides source listings.
• We already completed cloud support updates, and will make an announcement with instructions soon.

For all the details you can review the 4.0.0.M2 Release Notes. and please let us know of any problems for bugs you may find.

Next Up Milestone 3

In Milestone 3 we are ramping up component development, including calendar, autoComplete behavior, tabPanel, messages, collapsiblePanel, inplaceSelect, and more. This release is scheduled for late September, early October.

If we are missing your favorite component, or if you find an issue please let us know either through our forums, or our project jira. You can also see our current plans by following the 4.0.0.Milestone3 project in jira, or dropping by one of our public IRC meetings. See our Project Calendar and the Meeting Information page for more details, agendas, and minutes.

So What About the Final Release

We are in the process of evaluating the remaining components, and features for the Final release. Although our schedule have slipped due to unforeseen issues, we still plan to get the Final release out as soon as possible. More to come…

[Project Site] [Downloads] [JIRA] [User Forums] [Design Forums] [RichFaces Twitter]

The final re-post to remind you to use the feeds from JBoss Tools to get JBoss tooling news ;)

Blogging about upcoming webinar tomorrow, the Cloud efforts and bringng back life to a BPEL project.

See it at JBoss Tools Blog

I'm very pleased to say that we have released the first beta of Weld 1.1.0, the reference implementation of JSR-299: Contexts and Dependency Injection for Java EE. It's based on the CDI 1.0 API. You can find direct download links at the bottom of this post or you can pull the artifacts from the JBoss Maven Repository.

Highlights from this release are:

• Ability to exclude classes from scanning and deployment as beans by Weld. You can configure this in beans.xml for the bean archive you are deploying:

<beans xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee" 
        xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
        xmlns:weld="http://jboss.org/schema/weld/beans" 
        xsi:schemaLocation="
           http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://jboss.org/schema/cdi/beans_1_0.xsd
           http://jboss.org/schema/weld/beans http://jboss.org/schema/weld/beans_1_1.xsd">
    
    <weld:scan>
        <!-- Don't include GWT support if GWT is not installed -->
        <weld:exclude name="com.acme.gwt.**">
            <weld:if-class-available name="!com.google.GWT"/>
        </weld:exclude>
    </weld:scan>

</beans>

• The new Pastecode example, which shows off many of the new EJB 3.1 features in use with Weld
• around 60 bug fixes
• Some improvements to error reporting (with a lot more planned for Weld 1.1.0.Beta2)
• Unsafe instantiators (Nicklas will blog about this soon!)
• A new proxy layer (that doesn't suffer from the memory leaks that Javassist has)
• Improvements in memory usage, with more planned for Beta2

A couple of weeks back, we released 1.0.2.CR2 of the CDI TCK as well - you can find the links for it below :-)

Thanks go to David Allen, Marius Bogoevici, Stuart Douglas, Martin Gencur, Jozef Hartinger, Nicklas Karlsson, Aslak Knutsen, Peter Lenyi, Matija Mazi, Pete Royle for their hard work on this release!

JBoss Tools

JBoss Tools 3.2.M1 and later has got great CDI support - they've implemented around 60 validations (meaning you get that vitally important feedback about whether you made a mistake much earlier) and added content assist for EL in JSF, as well provided excellent integration with m2eclipse, meaning you can easily scaffold a new project, and then import it into Eclipse. Check it out

JBoss AS

Weld 1.1.0.Beta1 will be included in the next release of JBoss AS 6.0; until then you are best off using a snapshot build of JBoss AS. We recommend you use this build, unless you want to live life on the edge!

About Weld

Weld is used in GlassFish V3 and the JBoss AS 6 series. Weld also has support for Servlet containers such as Tomcat and Jetty. Alternatively, you can use Weld with Java SE.

There is great testing support via Arquillian, which allows you to test in Weld SE, a mocked out Java EE container, Tomcat or Jetty, as well as JBoss AS and GlassFish.

If you are just getting started, there are a few examples in the distribution to guide you (look for instructions in the reference guide, and each example has a readme.txt). If you are looking for help, try our user forums, or perhaps join us on IRC.

[ Distribution (Weld, CDI TCK) ] | [ Release Notes (Weld, CDI TCK) ] | [ Reference Guide (Weld, CDI TCK ] | [ Issue Tracker (Weld, CDI TCK) ] | [ CDI Javadoc ]

Birmingham, UK. 9th August 2010

The 2010 Open Source Awards was launched today by Packt, inviting people to visit www.PacktPub.com and submit nominations for their favorite Open Source project. Now in its fifth year, the Award has been adapted from the established Open Source CMS Award with the wider aim of encouraging, supporting, recognizing and rewarding all Open Source projects.

WordPress won the 2009 Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Award in what was a very close contest with MODx and SilverStripe. While MODx was the first runner up, SilverStripe, a Most Promising CMS Award winner in 2008, made its way to the second runner up position in its first year in the Open Source CMS Award final.

The 2010 Award will feature a prize fund of $24,000 with several new categories introduced. While the Open Source CMS Award category will continue to recognize the best content management system, Packt is introducing categories for the Most Promising Open Source Project, Open Source E-Commerce Applications, Open Source JavaScript Libraries and Open Source Graphics Software. CMSes that won the Overall CMS Award in previous years will continue to compete against one another in the Hall of Fame CMS category. These new categories will ensure that the Open Source Awards is the ultimate platform to recognise excellence within the community while supporting projects both new and old. “We believe that the adaption of the Award and the new categories will provide a new level of accessibility, with the Award recognizing a wider range of Open Source projects; both previous winners while at the same time, encouraging new projects” said Julian Copes, organizer of this year’s Awards.

Packt has opened up nominations for people to submit their favorite Open Source projects for each category at www.PacktPub.com/open-source-awards-home . The top five in each category will go through to the final, which begins in the last week of September. For more information on the categories, please visit Packt’s website www.PacktPub.com/blog/packt’s-2010-open-source-awards-announcement

Contacts

Julian Copes PR Executive, Packt Publishing

julianc@packtpub.com www.PacktPub.com

About Packt

Packt is a modern, unique publishing company with a focus on producing cutting-edge books for communities of developers, administrators, and newbies alike. Packt’s books and publications share the experiences of fellow IT professionals in adapting and customizing today's systems, applications, and frameworks. Their solutions-based books give readers the knowledge and power to customize the software and technologies they’re using to get the job done. For more information, please visit www.PacktPub.com