JBoss.CZ alive

I've resuscitated JBoss.CZ, the Czech community portal about JBoss technologies, now with a new design and soon with more and more stories on a regular basis from different authors. If you are Czech, add its feed to your reader and expect more. And if you are bold enough, join us in our effort!

A new web console for JBoss ESB

JBoss ESB is definitely a very nicely implemented service bus with a strong focus on SOA principles. It is an open source, backed by a living community, deployed in many enterprises. However, it has one obvious deficiency: a rather limited user interface. There is a bunch of tiny consoles - for management, configuration, transformation, but none of them really fulfills what I consider a must - comprehensive, intelligible, web-based tool for managing of all ESB artefacts. I'd like to browse and search through services, visualize a message flow within a service, create new actions and listeners by drag-n-drop etc.
You may say: if you don't like the present state, help and improve by yourself. And we did! We are close to a beta release of our web console, planned for the beginning of December. You can see some screenshots and more at esb-console.com. Stay tuned!

Oracle BEA strategy

Oracle is fast with the BEA acquisition, now it's clear about their product strategy. Good news from the area of application servers, WebLogic Server is taken as number one. Similarly with AquaLogic BPM and AquaLogic Enterprise Repository, both are considered as strategic in their fields (BPM and SOA governance, respectively). A slight surprise about AquaLogic Service Bus, it will be merged with the Oracle's one, but still - a strategic product. Not so cool about WebLogic Portal, AquaLogic User Interaction and WebLogic Integration, they will continue but will be converged, integrated etc. My former prediction is quite close, even I guessed a brighter future for ALSB ;)

Update: I was informed about ALSB staying much the same thing, enriched by Oracle's features, nice.

Beauty of Madrid Airport

Airport buildings are usually guite ugly and the same could be said about that one in Madrid until the new Terminal 4 was built and opened in 2006. I spent there some time this Friday and was amazed by its architecture. It is airy, futuristic but still natural. Just have a look:



Note: the pictures are not done by me (because results from my mobile are rather poor), taken from Wikipedia.

BEA story

If you are from the middleware business, you may find this BEA bittersweet ode worth of reading (via Stefan). I'm not an BEA employee so I can't comment the view of Stu, but seems to me this kind of criticism is important and valuable, for BEA, Oracle and all of us others when keeping our business running.
And, if you are the same looser in english as I am, you can enrich your vocabulary by the expression of "bean counters" :)

Protest against violence in Tibet

Apparently, there is no protection of human rights, no fundamental freedom in Tibet. If you are based in Prague, join the protest demonstration today.

Plastic soup

Imagine sailing in ocean, jumping into water to cool off and...realizing you are swiming in the middle of a plastic waste. Well, it seems to be a reality now. After reading of this article, I'm stunned and crushed. There is a debris of plastic floating in Pacific ocean in size of a continent!
I'm used to sort waste at home/office and now will be doing even more consistently.I don't want to meet my Danone yougurt twice!