The AeroGear project has just released 1.0.0.M2c as our first followup since launch! This release was focused on improving the archetype and quickstart mobile/html5 examples. They got more than just a new look and feel though. We added better device detection, improved our responsive design, integrated with JBoss Tools, JBoss AS 7.1, and more...

The getting started wiki has been fully updated to show you how to build your own mobile/HTML5 based application. This means built, tested, and deployed to JBoss AS 7.1 in just a matter of minutes. Giving you a great base to build your own application from. Then our deep dive wiki gives you all the details you need to need for our HTML5, CSS3, jQuery Mobile, JAX-RS endpoints and more.

Notable Updates

Here are some of the notable updates to our core example and archetype:

• Updates to our responsive design for better client and resolution handling
• Updated look and feel for both desktop, and mobile interfaces.
• Added JSONP support for cross domain access to our endpoints.
• JBoss Tools 3.3 Beta1 integration with JBoss Central
• Integrated with OpenShift's AS 7.1 cartridge with deployment straight from JBoss Tools.
• Lots of updates to comments, and docs for better self explaining source
• Updated our live demo showing this all on OpenShift
• Added our HelloWorld quickstart to the mix

Whats Next

We're still just getting started, and our M3 release is going to dig into more advanced areas. We'll be looking at hybrid application support, application based security for clients and endpoints, and more. We'll also be creating our own advanced example set to showcase different technologies and approaches for mobile development with JBoss.

Stay tuned for 1.0.0.M3 in the next 6-8 weeks, and remember this is open source - so if you've got an itch and an idea stop by our forums, or our IRC channel to share! If you are interested in a more permanent situation - we're hiring!!! We're working on all aspects of mobile development, so if you want to play with some of the hottest technologies on the planet - contact me!

Community Call To Action

Just as a reminder we’ve got team meetings on IRC at #aerogear @ irc.freenode.net, user, and developer forums, all of our code is up on github for sharing, and we’re always looking for motivated developers to step up and join the team!

Success comes with a strong community, and everyone getting involved however they can! Bring your questions, and opinions, and let's hear from you!!

[AeroGear Project] [GitHub] [Twitter] [User Forums] [Dev Forums]

I’m very happy to announce the creation of AeroGear, the newest project at JBoss! The AeroGear project is all about making mobile development of all kinds as easy as possible with JBoss! This project is focused on three things; education, innovation, and community!

Education

We’ll be covering all aspects of mobile application development! This includes the latest HTML5 technologies used in the mobile web, and in hybrid application frameworks like the Apache Cordova. All the way to JBoss AS based services, mobile RichFaces/JSF2, tooling, and native application support, and prototyping.

To wet your whistle we’ve put together a 5 minute video to show you how easy it is to get from zero to a mobile web application with cloud hosted services on JBoss.

Just in case you missed it at the end, the link to the live hosted demo on Openshift is at http://poh5-aerogear.rhcloud.com.

Assuming that got your interests up, we go a lot deeper. Our step by step guide on building this HTML5 mobile application yourself, including where to fork it on github is available right on our wiki page. There are also guides detailing the specifics on single page applications, HTML5 updates, CSS3, jQuery Mobile, RESTful endpoints, and more here.

Innovation

Our initial focus is on providing excellent examples, tutorials, and techniques for enterprise mobile developers. These will cover mobile web, hybrid, and native applications approaches for working with JBoss and other 3rd party projects. For all you polyglot lovers out there, we’re not limiting ourselves just to Java either, we’ll have pure HTML, and JavaScript demos, TorqueBox and Ruby will make an appearance, and we’ll be looking at other approaches as well.

However, at the same time we'll be developing new mobile[native, hybrid, and web] based frameworks for solving real concerns of enterprise developers. The most immediate of these include offline data synchronization, security, container integration, and support across a broad range of devices.

We’re currently designing and discussing some of these solutions, and want your input! Head over to the AeroGear Developer space for more. We plan on moving pretty fast here and hope to have some real world prototypes up and running soon.

Community

Whether you are a long time Java EE developer looking to migrate existing applications to mobile clients, or client developers looking for a powerful back-end for your applications this is where you can learn more about both, and become part of the community building it!!

We’ve got team meetings on IRC at #aerogear @ irc.freenode.net, user, and developer forums, all of our code is up on github for sharing, and we’re always looking for motivated developers to step up and join the team! We’ll be speaking at up coming conferences and JUGs around the world, as well as having regular blogs, webinars, and screencasts! Watch this space and our forums for the latest.

Success comes with a strong community, and everyone getting involved however they can! Bring your questions, and opinions, and let's hear from you!!

[AeroGear Project] [GitHub] [Twitter] [User Forums] [Dev Forums]

In my previous blog about Brian Leathem becoming the RichFaces project lead, I mentioned that the release of RichFaces 4.1 is imminent. It is not longer imminent, but upon us!

I'm very happy to say that today Brian announced the release of RichFaces 4.1.0.Final!! This is a great release for RichFace and JSF, please take a look at Brian's blog for all the details, and keep an eye out for some follow up blogs highlighting the new features!

The release of RichFaces 4.1 is imminent and with it brings some great advancements to the project and JSF! Among the most notable are additional mobile support, push upgrades, new components, and more.

Recently however, I’ve been focusing on more general mobile and HTML5 initiatives. You can see some of what I’ve been up to in the webinar I had Wednesday Dec. 7th on getting started with HTML5/Mobile development with JBoss (recording will be available soon).

This has meant that I’ve not had the time to dedicate to RichFaces that it deserves, and so I’m thrilled that we have an engineer and leader like Brian Leathem who has agreed to lead the project into the future!! He is already the seam-faces project lead, and has been a critical member of the RichFaces for some time!

Brian and the rest of the RichFaces team have not only done a great job on RichFaces 4.1, but also have some great plans for the future of RichFaces. Brian has started to outline these to start the discussions. This is only going to pick up steam once 4.1 is out!!

I’m not just going to disappear though, mobile and HTML5 are certainly an integral part of RichFaces! Keep an eye out in this space for more from me and JBoss about all aspects of mobile application development including mobile web, hybrid, and native techniques.

I wanted to take a moment and thank the RichFaces team and community! I’m could not be more proud of the people that use and develop RichFaces. Through our forums, weekly meetings, and now github we’ve seen a huge increase in contributors, users, and colleagues. To all of you:

We're going to dive down into the rabbit hole, and follow up on Wesley Hales great video on deploying the mobile web optimized RichFaces TweetStream application to Red Hat's new, free PaaS offering OpenShift Express complete with JBoss AS 7 under the hood!

Whats Been Covered

There has already been a lot of coverage on OpenShift, and the mobile web optimized TweetStream app. So I'm not going to cover old ground. Check out these blogs and videos:

• JBoss & OpenShift Launch Page
• Video describing TweetStream presented by Wesley Hales and myself
• My blog explaining TweetStream in more detail
• Lukas's blog on getting tweetstream running on JBoss AS 7
• Wesley's 4 minutes to the cloud video on OpenShift Express, and TweetStream

OpenShift Express Updates

The RichFaces team is in the process of migrating our RichFaces Showcase application from Google App Engine to OpenShift Express, we'll have it ready soon. OpenShift offers a number of benefits over GAE, it is a real Java EE container, supports RichFaces push and has a much less restrictive API

Like many other free PaaS offerings OpenShift Express does have a few limitations that you need to consider. The most important ones for our application are limited threads, and JMS support. Note that all of these go away when you move up to OpenShift Flex!

RichFaces Push streamlined

When RichFaces 4.0.0.Final was released our push component was tied to JMS. This provides excellent enterprise level messaging capabilities, but unfortunately requires some setup to use. Since JMS is not provided by Express out of the box we needed to make some changes. So for 4.1.0 we are adding in a few options!

Starting with RichFaces 4.1.0.M1 RichFace Push can be decoupled from JMS. All that is needed is to set a context param:

<context-param>
    <param-name>org.richfaces.push.jms.disable</param-name>
    <param-value>true</param-value>
</context-param>

This will switch push to using an internal message queue. Look for further blogs, and documentation on this in the future. This is also one step closer to our plan to support CDI events as part of RichFaces Push.

Atmosphere updates on the way

Another change that was needed was moving to a snapshot version of Atmosphere. Atmosphere had a bug where it was creating a new thread for each request - ouch! Since OpenShift Express has limited threads available we needed a way around this.

Thankfully this issue was fixed in the Atmosphere 0.8-SNAPSHOT branch. This version of Atmosphere is due to be released in August, and RichFaces will use it by default once it is (likely in the 4.1.0.M2 release).

For now - if you are working on your own RichFaces push application and deploying to Express you'll need to override the Atmosphere version. This is simple enough with Maven, just add the following to your pom:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.atmosphere</groupId>
  <artifactId>atmosphere-runtime</artifactId>
  <version>0.8-SNAPSHOT</version>
</dependency>

Infinispan cache LOCAL support

As was discussed in some of the linked blogs, the TweetStream application uses Infinispan under the covers to provide caching for the tweet data that we process. Infinispan in cluster mode uses jGroups to provide advanced communication support.

The problem here is the threading that accompanies this. For TweetStream it is important to make sure that you are using Infinispan in LOCAL mode. The latest TweetStream source has been updated to use the LOCAL cache.

Where to go from here

Now that we've gone over updates that are needed to take advantage of OpenShift Express I encourage you do give it a shot on your own. The source code is in the TweetStream git repo. Just follow the readme to setup and build it. Then deploy following the instructions in Wesley's video.

There will be more JBoss and OpenShift blogs and videos coming out, so stay tuned and check out JBoss and OpenShift page for the latest news.

[OpenShift Express] [JBoss OpenShift News] [OpenShift Twitter] [TweetStream git Repo] [RichFaces Twitter]