Red Hat JBoss Middleware: A technology stack for IoT-Applications

| Heinz Wilming

JBoss EAP 7 and ActiveMQ Artemis as connector between temperature and humidity and the application architecture

Most IoT-Applications face similar challenges on its way from sensor to final aggregation in terms of usage and, where applicable relaying of data. In this article, we introduce an architecture based on the new Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBoss EAP) in Version 7 to outline a IoT application as a showcase.

MQTT has certainly become a standard protocol for IoT and in this context the Internet of Things is integrated via MQTT.

One new major update of JBoss EAP 7 is ActiveMQ Artemis as Messaging Broker with support for MQTT as transport protocol. JBoss EAP 7 is our preferred technology, i.a. for IoT architectures because of its outstanding technological capabilities thus facilitating efficient development of scalable and secure applications.

A combined temperature and humidity sensor, the Bosch XDK, and Harting’s Mica Box are used to supply data. It is the MQTT and the JBoss EAP 7 Middleware that connect and build a bridge between this sensor setup and the rest of the world.

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Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 7 (JBoss EAP 7) – final release

| Heinz Wilming

A few days ago, Red Hat released the major version 7 of the open source Java EE application server, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBoss EAP).

Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBoss EAP) is the supported and quality assured version of the WildFly application server from the JBoss community.

jboss-eap-wildfly-upstream-history

The JBoss EAP 7 is based on the version 10 of the WildFly application server. In 2013 Red Hat renamed the JBoss AS community project to WildFly to avoid confusion with the JBoss brand which referred to several different things at once, the application server, the JBoss Community, and a range of other JBoss Products.

The main improvements and highlights of the JBoss EAP 7 release

This article focuses on the following main improvements and highlights of the new major release of the JBoss EAP 7:

  • implementation of the new specifications of the Java Enterprise Edition 7
  • enhanced modularity
  • management improvements
  • component updates
  • compatibility and interoperability

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Adobe Experience Design – Review

| lisapfisterer

tl;dr? A summary and pros and cons list can be found at the end of this article plus some useful shortcuts.

The German version of this article is published here.

What is Adobe Experience Design?

It’s Adobe’s missing piece for rapid prototyping of interactive wireframes and simple sharing of those. Design some screens for your app, pull some arrows between them to define interaction, check your work in the preview mode, share the link and do a live demo directly on your phone. The workflow is surprisingly easy.

The tool is currently available for Mac only in version 0.5.2. It’s a preview, hence we will be lenient and wait for features like layers and scrollable boxes.

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Upgrade a Jenkins farm

| Robert Magnus

We have been using successfully Jenkins for a long time, but our Jenkins environment was very outdated. The master and its slaves were still running on JDK1.6 with Jenkins version 1.456. So it was “very” old. Even the installation of new plugins was impossible  because these were usually based on Java7. Overall we have 20 Jenkins slaves for 27 projects and 200 jobs. The projects are in several states: just started, ongoing, release or maintanence. The normal project work should not be disturbed by this upgrade.

Therefore we decided not to update the existing installation but to use a completely new Jenkins and update the JDK too.

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Shrinking patched JBoss EAP server to a reasonable size

| M. Dahm

As explained in the blog entry Upgrading and patching the Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform JBoss EAP offers the possibility to conveniently update the server installation with the latest patches.
However, the way this is implemented leaves all previous versions and patches of your modules behind. I.e., older versions of the JAR files will not be used anymore, but just waste disk space. This is desirable only, if you want to have the possibility to roll back a patch later on or would like to keep track of the patch history.
To give you some numbers: The current EAP 6.4 server has an initial size of 166MB, but grows to a size of 509MB when updated to version 6.4.4. In this article we’d like to show you how to remove all unused garbage from the installation.

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Getting started with ELK and JBoss EAP6

| Martin Möller

In this post we will describe what is needed to get started with managing your EAP 6 logs with ElasticSearch, Logstash and Kibana. There are several reasons why you would want to collect your logging output in a central place.

  • Aggregate (output from multiple applications / hosts)
  • Correlate events in different systems
  • Analyze (more than grep)
  • Backup
  • Integrate into monitoring
  • Gather statistics

A common solution that supports all this use cases is provided by the ELK stack. It consists of ElasticSearch (ES), Logstash and Kibana. ElasticSearch provides persistence and analytics, Logstash provides the pipeline that brings your Logs into ES and Kibana provides a GUI for querying and dashboards.

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Split git repositories by subfolders with history

| Robert Magnus

This article describes how to turn the subfolders in a git repository into new git repositories, keeping the history.

In our case we have a big git repository (2GB) with slides for a lot of courses. Every course was a subdirectory in the repository. So even if you hold just one course, you have to clone everything. That’s why we decided to put every course into a separate repository. We use SCM-Manager for our repository and could therefore use its REST api in the script.

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