Fuse Forge is now open!

The FUSE team has been hard at work over the last few months and here is an update on the great new capabilities that we're rolling out. We are entering a new phase in our community evolution by opening up FUSE Forge. The Forge is a collaborative environment for the development of open source projects related to FUSE and the Apache projects that they leverage. On FUSE Forge you can create and run a project, participate as a committer in one or more projects, or just browse the ever-growing library of components designed for FUSE. In the spirit of open source transparency the FUSE team has moved all internal development to the forge.

New Project Highlights:

• FUSE Depot - FUSE Depot is a web-based tool for provisioning distributed applications on Apache Tomcat and FUSE ESB, our certified distribution of Apache ServiceMix. With FUSE Depot you can assemble bundles and libraries into applications, assign those applications to containers, and schedule deployments all from a central web console.

• RestMQ - RestMQ defines an open, easy to integrate, loosely coupled, technology independent and interoperable messaging protocol so that you can use your web browser (or curl on the command line) to reliably send and consume messages.

• Management - A set of FUSE management extensions using JMX and REST, visualized using FUSE HQ.

• Actional Diagnostics - Actional Diagnostics helps developers build, test and deliver Web services for SOA, REST and POX by reducing the complexity of XML and making testing easy and accessible early in the product life cycle.

For more information on FUSE Forge see the FAQ!

Scaling ActiveMQ

Scaling ActiveMQ has come up a lot recently on the ActiveMQ users lists. One of the strengths of Apache ActiveMQ is its flexibility - but sometimes that's its curse too. Out of the box, ActiveMQ is configured to handle hundreds of very deep (contain 100 of millions of messages) - but its not the best configuration to scale queues horizontally (thousands of Queues on the same broker).

I've added a couple of FAQ entries to the Apache ActiveMQ site:

1. Scaling Queues horizontally 
   
2. Storing millions of messages in a Queue.
   

Something we need to address in the upcoming 5.3 release, is to provide more example configurations - to enable users to get a good head start on picking the right configuration for their use cases.

Work Starting on Mixing ActiveMQ and SonicMQ

So we are getting some of the SonicMQ experts to dig in and help work on the next major version of ActiveMQ.  

The aim is to take performance and scalability to the next level - while ensuring that stability and reliability increases.  The SonicMQ guys have some great test environments which will enable us to provide even better quality code out of the door.

There's also some cool features that SonicMQ has like its Dynamic Routing Architecture and clustering that we are going to look to repurpose.

As ActiveMQ 6.0 is going to be a new architecture - it also enables us to look at supporting some more weird and wonderful wire protocols too (the invasive ones which force you to rewrite your broker to use them). 

The development work is being done at Apache - with Hiram setting the pace at the moment. Please feel free to jump in and help - :)

 

90's Retro is in!

Sometimes you just get distracted on some of the most mundane things - like design's of Logo's  Web Site etc.  Though when you start working for slightly larger organizations, you soon realize that there is a lot of things you don't know.

For example, I didn't realize that the 90's retro was back? I just came across this thread (pretty old I admit) about what constitutes a 90's look:

things like a swish, CAPITALIZATION , drop downs etc. 

So its refreshing that we have decided to be a head of the curve and will be adopting the 90's look again! Just of to get a mullet ....

Progress FUSE Open Source Team still Growing ...

Its been a hectic couple of months as we try and find our feet in Progress - but the Progress folks have done their best to make us feel part of their family. 

Progress has some great SOA technology, and we've been having some good cross-pollination of ideas with the Sonic folks and pulling together development plans so we can leverage Apama, Actional, Mindreef etc.

We've been growing the number of users and committers from Progress of our Apache projects - ActiveMQ,  Camel, ServiceMix, CXF etc.  The size of the team was already good from the IONA days - but we are always looking at extending our breadth and depth of Apache committers.

In the past couple of weeks we've been able to strengthen our ServiceMix team by dragging back Chris Custine and our ActiveMQ team have some great additions in Dejan Bosanac (who is one of the authors of ActiveMQ in Action) and Tim Bish (ActiveMQ CPP lead).

We have another one or two Apache commiters joining in the next few weeks too!

Btw - a common misconception of our FUSE Products is that you can only get them on subscription - which simply isn't true. They are drop in replacements for the Apache projects (same code mainly), same license, same cost (its FREE) - the only difference being we have more control over the releases.  Our enhancements and patches go into Apache first (we always want the Apache projects to gain the benefits of our investment) and then we pull in the deltas into the FUSE repos - selectively taking the deltas to build branches we release from.  This enables us to support our customers (users who want to have the benefit of our support in a timely manner) in development and production in the same way a closed source organization would :). Why not give them a try ? A lot (tens of thousands) of folks already have, as the gain the benefit of stable, regular releases. And if you don't like them - as they are just drop in replacements - just go back to the Apache versions.

IONA FUSE Open Source Group now offically part of Progress

Progress completed its acquisition of IONA Technologies last Friday. The FUSE open source group will be running as its own business unit as part of the Progress Software Corporation - so we are still operating as before - but with considerably more investment.

Progress saw the number and quality of enterprise customers we have using our integration products, saw that we consistently met and exceeded our sales targets and realized our potential to grow significantly.

So although we currently employee a lot of open source developers - we will be recruiting even more - and have some exciting new software projects in development for release in 2009 :)

Most useful iphone app I'm using to date - is Vicinity

I'm behind most folks in upgrading to an iphone 3G - but the most useful iphone app I'm currently using is vicinity - its locates all the useful things you need if you on the road and  find yourself in a strange place  (restaurant, cafes, bars, stores, taxis, banks etc) - it integrates very well Maps too - I highly recommend it! 

There's a nice overview here.