One of the good thing about open companies is that your manager knows what you do through your blog and commit history. Which made me think that I have not explained what I have been busy with in a long time :D

In the past few weeks a bunch of rallies have happened all over France. No, it's not because of the elections. It's because developers see the benefit of dev conferences.

Devoxx France

Devoxx France is self defined as 25% English, 75% French and no bullshit. I was lucky enough to talk about a few of the subjects that keep me busy these days:

• an introduction to Ceylon
• a discussion on Hibernate OGM and where we are at
• and a live session of Les Cast Codeurs podcast

For a premiere, it was damn well executed: 1200 Java enthusiasts at the center of Paris. Congratulation to the team. Well except for the choice of carpet, what have you been smoking? :)

Mix-IT

I also went to Lyon to the Mix-IT conference. What was interesting here was the mix of Java and Agile content. I did a new talk on Hibernate Search, spending a lot of time in demo and live coding mode building a search engine and in particular adding faceting.

Interview on OTN

I also got interviewed at Devoxx France for the Oracle Technology Network. I brushed over JPA 2.1, Bean Validation 1.1, JSR openness and JPA for NoSQL. It's in English and it's around 10 mins. Check it out.

More French conferences

If you are in France, you must go to one of the many conferences organized around you. They grow like mushrooms. Besides Devoxx France and Mix-IT, here are a few more you will be interested in:

• Breizhcamp in Breizhlandy near Rennes
• JUG Summer Camp at La Rochelle
• RivieraDev at Sophia-Antipolis

Are you a sales person? Always on the road?

No, I try and work in between conferences but I must admit that has been tough recently. I forced myself to slow down and get back to code. Many good things are coming up in Hibernate OGM and Hibernate Search. Stay tuned.

I recently had the pleasure and attending and presenting at the Greater Indian Developer Summit (GIDS) in Bangalore. I was joined by fellow JBossians Andrew, Bruno, Manik and Mike.

The conference was excellent, I think we all noticed the really high calibre of the attendees - lots of excellent questions throughout the sessions!

On my way home, I stopped off at the London JBUG (kudos to Steve & co for breathing new life into the group!).

I captured both the presentations I did, and they are up on vimeo - check them out if either topic interests you!

• AS7 On OpenShift
• Building Modern Applications

A standard, universal @Transactional annotation is coming in Java EE 7. You can read more about the proposal here.

However, there are some important things to keep in mind:

• @Transactional is being developed as a revision to the JTA spec (as an MR)
• @Transactional is not being developed by the CDI EG, nor will it be in the CDI spec
• Feedback on @Transactional should be sent to the Java EE platform EG not to the CDI EG. The platform EG is conducting the revision to the JTA spec.

Java EE does not recognize a Servlet container as a compliant environment and therefore this feature will not be available there by default (mainly due to the absence of JTA in this environemnt).

However, to bridge the divide, Deltaspike will likely offer support for @Transactional in a Servlet environment since we acknowledge that it is important, and is an environment preferred by many developers (but we still strongly urge you to migrate to the web profile!!).

I'm happy to announce the 7th alpha release of our IronJacamar 1.1 series.

Full release notes are here.

datasources:1.1

This release adds support for the datasources-1_1.xsd schema, which adds the

<pool>
  ...
  <allow-multiple-users/>
</pool>

element, which tells the pool implementation to switch to an implementation that accounts for multiple users accessing the datasource instance through the datasource.getConnection(user, password) method.

We have updated the datasources subsystem in JBoss Application Server 7 to support this new schema too.

Arquillian and friends

This release also features Arquillian 1.0.0.Final and its friends making the foundation for our embedded testing environment.

A congrats to our friends in the Arquillian community for their first stable release !

Other changes

Worth to mention is also

• Updates to our code generator
• New security inflow module
• Bug fixes

Be sure to check that out too.

The Road Ahead

We still have a number of outstanding features before we can release, so the race is on :) Of course we will keep an eye out for issues popping up with JBoss Application Server 7, and our upcoming JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6.0 release.

And, if you didn't sign up for JUDCon/Boston yet do it now. I'll open the show with my The Bird and the Cheetah - A Tale from the Depths of JBoss Application Server talk where we will take a deep dive into why Java EE Connector Architecture is so important for an application server, and how to configure your deployments.

For Those About to Rock, We Salute You !

[WebSite] [Download] [Documentation] [JIRA] [Forum]

Hibernate Validator 4.3.0.CR1 has just arrived. This release is hopefully the last stepping stone to 4.3.0.Final. As mentioned before we want to get 4.3 out as fast as possible, so that we can start working on Hibernate Validator 5 (aligning with Bean Validation 1.1).

Aside of some minor bug fixes (HV-572, HV-573, HV-574, HV-575), this release is all about performance. We wanted to make sure that you get a Hibernate Validator which is at least as fast as the previous versions. To prove that, we introduced a new module performance which allows us to easier compare the performance of different validator releases. For more information have a look at this readme.

On important fact which is a side effect of the introduction of JBoss Logging is that even though the API of Validator 4.3 is backwards compatible with 4.2, you need now a Java 6 runtime environment (see also HV-569 and HV-481). We believe this should not a big issue and it is time to move on, but if you think differently, speak now or forever hold your peace! ;-)

Hibernate Validator 4.3.0.CR1 is available for download in the JBoss Maven Repository under the GAV org.hibernate:hibernate-validator:4.3.0.CR1 or via SourceForge. Read the changelog for a list of all chnges and make sure to check the Hibernate Validator Migration Guide as well.

Let us know what you think via the forum or the project issue tracker.

Enjoy!