The post “Free of lock-in and open source — features that matter” presented information about why certain open source licenses were chosen for JBoss Developer Studio and that those licenses did not restrict the usage of the bundled Eclipse plugins by other Eclipse vendors.
Following that, I was contacted by JBoss Developer Studio project lead Max Rydahl Andersen, who corrected the post on licensing details.
His point is that the licenses chosen are more and varied than I posted, and were chosen specifically to allow maximum freedom. No licenses prevent their usage or forking by others, including other commercial versions.
From that discussion, here is a clearer picture of the mix of licenses:
JBoss Developer Studio is released under the GPL as a distribution, but that is not the license of all components. This is similar to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is overall under the GPL and many components within are different open source licenses.
The parts inside of JBoss Developer Studio are a mix of (mostly) EPL, LGPL, and ASL.. In specific:
The result is a 100% open source, vendor supported Java developer IDE without lock-in.
These are the presentations from JBoss World Orlando 2008.
As a round-up of developer related posts from JBoss World last week, here are a number of links shamelessly pulled from Red Hat blogs aggregation of feeds that included the JBoss.org feed aggregator and the Dev Fu feed. There are a few more business-flavored posts here that are also relevant for Java developers.
In his session this morning on JBoss Cache, Manik Surtani demonstrated caching and clustering via the lightweight GUI described in “Visualizing JBoss Cache.” It’s a fairly straightforward GUI that gains from it’s simplicity. He mentioned that the GUI demo was available for download, which I found here.
In the demo, Manik is using a buddy node configuration. You can read more about buddy nodes and other clustering configurations via the links in “Full cache at JBoss World“. Regarding one semantic clarification from the talk, a node is a cache instance, that is, a tree node in the data structure. This does not refer to, for example, a physical server node. One audience member who asked about the usage gave the clear language of, “A node is an object that has state in our application and that state needs to be replicated.”
This morning I attended Thomas Huete’s introduction to JBoss Portal while capturing the full audio of Mark Proctor giving an Introduction to JBoss Drools and the Business Rules Management System (BRMS). Then before the morning break I sat in and captured Introduction to Web Services by Heiko Braun.
In general, the sessions continue to follow a similar format. Full room, interested attendees, and questions regarding their real world situations. Lot’s of usage of JBoss Tools/JBoss Developer Studio for demonstrations. Speakers who really know their subject material, pulling together really great presentations, with real learning. Let’s not talk about the technical difficulties, m’kay?
During Heiko’s talk on web services, I took some notes that I’ll post here. (Any mistakes are my error or ignorance.) Later, when the audio and slides are available, this session will be one of a handful that we post the full audio. I’m very interested in how useful these full audio sessions are to you all. For one thing, that helps me in planning for future JBoss Worlds, knowing what you are interested in and what to skip.
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Just completed a great session with Emmanuel Bernard on Hibernate Search. Emmanuel is engaging as a speaker, and his demonstrating adding Hibernate Search capabilities to a web store in 15, well, 17 minutes was fun and informative. We got good multimedia coverage of this one (finally!), results featured here in the near future.
Right now I’m sitting in Max Katz’s talk on Developing Rich Internet Applications with JBoss RichFaces. Similar to what I’ve seen many times in the last few days, Max is doing a live demonstration using JBoss Developer Studio (the subscription version of JBoss Tools), writing a building up an application using JSF and RichFaces. It’s great to see a roomful of attention on these tools that were open sourced by Exadel and Red Hat.
JBoss Seam developers and authors Jacob Orshalick and Michael Yuan have just released some chapters from their upcoming second edition to JBoss Seam: Simplicity and Power Beyond Java(TM) EE to coincide with JBoss World. Jacob has an announcement here with more details about the second edition, and the chapters are available here.
Michael and Jacob have written Seam articles for Dev Fu (Michael’s and Jacob’s), and I’m looking forward to doing a full review of their book when it comes out. Now I just need to find someone who understands Seam well enough to write that review. 
Keynote at JBoss World yesterday started with Jim Whitehurst, the new Red Hat President and CEO. It was his 42nd day at Red Hat, an auspicious number to many of us. He brought a fresh perspective to the subject of “making money on free software.”
In his opening, Jim went over the basics — a discussion about the community model that Red Hat and JBoss follow, where a single entity manages the two communities, enterprise/business and open source. He started by making an honest statement about what he thought when he started the new job. To paraphrase, “I thought the model with an open source community and an enterprise community was an artificial construct to make it easier to sell free software.”
In his days now at Red Hat, Jim has dived in and discovered how alive, healthy, and essential this model is to the success of everyone involved. The open source community side is healthier than ever, and enterprise and business community members are learning how to be ahead and participate in the future through being part of the open community, while being day-to-day consumers of the stable and supported. This is something developers have known for years, and it was good to have a fresh-from-the-outside person with a business focus reaffirming this.
Following Jim was middleware CTO Sacha Labourey, who picked up the same theme of wrangling the fast moving open source community into the stable enterprise community’s needs. JBoss.org keeps things going the way JBoss has always been run (”It’s free, and it doesn’t suck”), while the enterprise branches are the focus for support, services, and the business relationship. This model is continuing to work well, with the actual numbers of community-based downloads increasing (20 million+) and the overall organization is growing.
Another point Sacha raised was the importance of the newer business unit structure of Red Hat. This may not seem important to developers on the face of it, but Sacha is right: the separate middleware business makes it clear that this community and product line is an important part of the Red Hat future. The middleware group now has the autonomy to work as they need, while still remaining part of the same great product family.
Sacha finished off his portion of the keynotes by bringing several project leads on stage to do actual product demonstrations. This was a nice element to add for a developer conference. It gave these leads another chance to make their voices heard, and it was a good demonstration of how well the products work together. Max Rydahl Andersen showed how easy it is to modify and deploy from within JBoss Developer Studio. Julian Viet demo’d Max’s web page pulled into JBoss Portal. At the end, Mark LIttle came up to show how this fits into the overall SOA. Throughout the demo, the A/V system gave Sacha challenges, but he handled it with aplomb and never lost the audience. After all, what better audience to witness everything going well with the code while the supporting system has fits?
Finishing off the afternoon with Microcontainer meets OSGi while running the full audio record for Introduction to JBoss Seam. Since I have to choose each hour what to record, and have to be there at the start of the session to plug in to the sound board and capture it all, there isn’t much chance to modify the recording schedule on the fly. For that reason, I have mixed introduction sessions with advanced sessions. The sessions are think and rich, so there is enough gravy to spread around for everyone.
This session has a good set of slides, so although we aren’t getting audio from it, you can get a lot of value from reading those, which are available after the show on jbossworld.com. So far I’ve seen useful lists and code samples, and now details of OSGi integration. You can read some background in this JBoss.org interview with Ales Justin. The project pages have more information, as do the product pages if you are looking for a subscription for the whole solution.
First session of JBoss World is Bela Ban and Brian Stansberry talking about optimizing HTTP session clustering, focusing on JBoss Cache and JGroups. Their talk is full of immediately useful info, and I see lots of note taking. Fortunately for all of these attendees, and also for everyone ever after, this is also the first talk that I’m we’re capturing full audio video for Dev Fu technical session archives. That audio video plus the slides from the talk should may help you find the useful tips, such as this one on tuning and slimming JBoss Application Server by searching for the misspellings in the wiki name “tuning sliming jboss“.
This room is packed wall to wall, and more than a few on the floor. So far this is the sign for the whole conference. There are a lot of people here. Don’t know if there are ever official numbers given out, but it seems well into the hundreds and hundreds. Pretty good for a developer focused conference.
The Red Hat video story team is here in force. I wandered around for the first twenty minutes of getting here this morning, saying howdies to friends. My excitement didn’t kick in until I went into the little back room (in the middle of everything) where the video editing is taking place. Not that it was a lot of equipment or looking like the MI5 van in an episode of Spooks. It is a relatively modest nerve center, but it’s where I’ll be spending some afternoons and evenings and maybe early mornings all week long, working with this great crew to bring you the developer story happening here at JBoss World.
Update: When I greedily went to listen to the recording after the session, I found it blank! Curses. Apparently I pushed the [Rec] button just one time, which puts it in standby mode. It faithfully stood by for a while, then went to sleep. We’ll just have to see how the video comes out for giving us useful audio, but I don’t have a lot of hope. Oh, well, spilt milk and all that, no time to cry. Thanks to Bob McWhirter of JBoss.org for his video capture, which gives us something much more than nothing.
