Small open source projects are difficult to keep alive. And what about Wise and TestedBy?

Hi all,
another time I have to say that a long time has passed since my last post :(

Well, I’ve been very very busy in last months driving (or at least help a lot to drive) a big change in my former company, leading a key project with more than fifty programmers involved distributed in various team, with a lot of biz analysts and so on. But it’s another story I’ll probably tell you at some point. But the important word in last sentence is former. Yep, who is following me on twitter (or have recently read about_us page or even is linked with me on linkedin) knows I’ve joined  Red Hat as Principal Software Engineer in JBoss division. That’s a cool interesting job (I’m working on IronJacamar project and AS7 development), but it’s making me very busy.

Anyway, back to the title of this post. It’s matter of fact that is very hard to keep alive open source projects in spare time. And maybe in last months some people thought that Wise is an almost dead project, and TestedBy a totally dead one. In fact we had very few time to  work on Wise and also on TestedBy for all the reasons stated above. But they aren’t dead and we are getting back on them (check last week commits for both!).

In particular Alessio is working on Wise to full support JBossWS-CXF container, while I’m planning to cleanup ESB module to support the last version (maybe after Alessio’s work). After that we will work on our object mapping subsystem needed to continue the implementation of our WebUI.

I’m refining in the mean time samples of TestedBy to make possible to release the first version of the project. BTW very probably we will leave “TestedBy” name and we will launch the first release of the project with a new cool name. I’ll keep you post here.

As said keeping open source project alive in spare time isn’t easy, and sometime it’s very very hard specially if contributors are very few and very busy. Would you be part of a cool open source project, with all the beauty of that? We would need in particular contributions for TestedBy in Eclipse area, but if you would land an hand in other area and/or in Wise we are fine with that too. Please contact us, your help could make the difference!

Last but not least Wise have a new very very cool logo. Thanks to Red Hat Design team and in particular to Cheynne for that! No link here…it merits a dedicated post!

As said a lot of cool stuffs are coming…stay tuned.

Analysing jar dependencies

Something like 2 months ago I wrote a post on how different classloaders can potentially cause you problems if you’re not that careful on where your libs are loaded from. Well, I’ve just had to face another issue of that type, with a library of mine loaded from the bootstrap classloader and referencing a class from servlet API that I don’t want to be loaded by that classloader too. The easy solution of course would have been to pull my lib out of the endorsed dir (the one the bootstrap classloader loads libs from), but how could I be sure that I did not break anything in my app? Besides running tests, I finally decided to give JBoss Tattletale a try… I saw all the hype around it when it was released some month ago, but I did not have the chance to use it for a practical issue before.

Well, in less than five minutes I checked out he project, built it and ran it against my endorsed lib dir. I got a report and some graphs basically showing no libraries in that dir (hence loaded by the bootstrap classloader) where directly depending on my library, thus it’s safe to pull it out of the endorsed dir. The easy solution was indeed OK and thanks to this tool I have a theoretical proof of that ;-)

Take a look at JBoss Tattletale, it’s really a cool tool. Perhaps you can start from its author’s blog: http://blog.hibernate.org/11166.lace

Java Application Server Day 2009

This post is to let you know a really interesting event that’s taking place soon in Genoa (Italy): the Java Application Server Day 2009.

As you can read on www.serverday.org, the event will be open to the entire Italian Java Community; international experts, developers and students will discuss the state of the art
and the future of Java Application Servers, with a focus on the innovations of
the recently released JBoss 5.0, Spring dm Server, GlassFish 3.0 & Oracle/WebLogic.

I’ve been asked to be there on behalf of JBoss / Red Hat, so I’ll present the recent changes in JBoss AS 5.

Hope you can join the event on May, 21st. Stay tuned for further updates.

JBossWS and Apache CXF collaboration

I’ve just pubblished a post on the JBosWS blog regarding the JBossWS involvement in the Apache CXF project. In few words, the JBossWS team is increasing its collaboration with the CXF developers, the target being to improve both projects.

It’s not that simple to achieve an active bi-directional collaboration, with both parties’ needs being considered, but this is working quite well now. For instance, read what Daniel Kulp (CXF lead) writes about the collaboration. Needless to say I like this, that’s a nice example of what open source can make possible.