BlackTie 2.0 MR1 Released!

Hello BlackTie-ers,

It is with great pleasure that I can announce the availability of our latest milestone release of BlackTie.

This time we focussed on the following:
1. Making sure we are XATMI and TX compliant
2. Overall enhancement of the administrative capabilities of BlackTie
3. Ensuring the recovery capabilities

You can view the release notes at: http://www.jboss.org/blacktie/release.html

If you are interested in seeing how the administrative capabilities are shaping up (including our RHQ plugin) take a look at: https://www.jboss.org/community/wiki/BlackTieAdministrationInterfaces

In terms of the remaining features for 2.0, these are still focussed around enhancing our administrative capabilities (including reconnect code for the XATMI application servers and clients). You can check our progress at the following link: https://jira.jboss.org/jira/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?mode=hide&requestId=12312050 (login required)

Heres the usual link to download the release: http://www.jboss.org/blacktie/downloads/

Also, if you have any questions about the release or BlackTie in general, please feel free to ask them over in our forum on jboss.org: http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewforum&f=301

All the best,
Tom

BlackTie Administration Coming Soon!

Hi guys,

Just a heads up that coming in BlackTie 2.0 are some significantly enhanced and filled out administration capabilities. For now you can take a look at a forum posting I just made with the preview of the operations that we are adding support for, plus, if you see anything missing, please feel free to comment on there!

http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&t=163926

All the best,
Tom

MR6 RELEASED!

Greetings BlackTie followers!

It is my pleasure to introduce you to the MR6 release of BlackTie!

We have had some major successes with this release and as always you can get the full release notes from:
http://jboss.org/blacktie/release.html

As this release provides a significant shift forward for the framework I just wanted to point out a few of the features that we added which I hope will be of interest to a good deal of you out there:
1. The major item is that we believe we have now achieved full XATMI and TX API compliance
2. Compatability for inter-machine communication from Linux to Windows
3. Our txfooapp example has been fully documented for use with Oracle database
4. Crash recovery support has been added for the individual server processes
5. A new administration interface has been added that allows us to integrate into the JBoss administration console - point your browsers to http://localhost:8080/admin-console to see this in action - you must have installed BlackTie for this to work!
6. The administration API has been extended to allow remote shutdown of servers
7. We have done some major work on the configuration system to make this platform neutral where possible

If you have been with us for a while now, we have some bad news for Berkeley users. Unfortunately Oracle have removed support for XA from this database and as such we can no longer support usage of this within BlackTie: http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=961909&tstart=0

Also, since MR5 we have created a new patch for stomp so you will need to follow step 5 and step 8.1-8.4 in the Building BlackTie wiki article:
https://www.jboss.org/community/wiki/BuildingBlacktie

Here's the usual link to download BlackTie MR6:
http://jboss.org/blacktie/downloads/

Enjoy!
Tom

BlackTie MR5 Released

Hi All,

We are very pleased to announce the availability of BlackTie MR5. This release represents a significant shift forward for the project as it introduces a significant new feature set:
1. JMS/Stomp based transport - Using a message broker allows XATMI services to be easily clustered and secured using standard JMS security
2. Cross platform transaction support - Transactions started in a Java JAB client or the application server can now span seamlessly to the C XATMI services
Alongside these breakthroughs in functionality we have also taken the opportunity to resolve several stability issues resulting in hopefully the greatest step forwards for BlackTie so far.

In terms of MR6, you can check our progress using Jira, which can be found at: https://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/BLACKTIE
We hope to concentrate on the following features for MR6:
1. Administration capabilities
2. A hybrid transport
3. Stability tuning

You can download the release and check the release notes at: http://www.jboss.org/blacktie/release.html

Enjoy!
The BlackTie Team

BlackTie MR4 released!

We are pleased to announce the availability of milestone release 4 of the BlackTie project.

The features that have been added in this release are:
1. An early access version of a JMS transport
2. The ability to store the configuration files in configurable locations
3. The validation of the configuration files against known schemas
4. As always, increases to the stability of the product
5. A set of scripts that can be used by standard make files to build servers and clients
6. Ensuring the XATMI and TX return codes are correctly handled
7. Use perfect hashing for the CORBA stubs generated by TAO_IDL
8. Supported chained transactions

Currently the team are hard at work on milestone 5, which we hope to include at least the following features:
1. More documentation
2. Allowing the deployment of C XATMI services into the JBoss MicroContainer
3. Routing requests support (and the further qualification of our JMS transport)
5. Increasing support for resource managers

As always, you can access the release from our website: http://www.jboss.org/blacktie/
Enjoy,
Tom

BlackTie Milestone 3 Released

Hi guys,

Just wanted to let you know that we have release milestone 3 of BlackTie. Hopefully the binaries should be available over the next for days but for those who are building from source, you can get hold of the latest code using the following tags:
Anon SVN: https://anonsvn.jboss.org/repos/blacktie/tags/Blacktie_1_0_M3/
Developer SVN: https://svn.jboss.org/repos/blacktie/tags/Blacktie_1_0_M3/

In terms of release notes, as this is generally a tidyup/bug fix release we haven't included them this time. The stability of it should be more than M1 so we do recommend people to upgrade as soon as possible. Also, the way we are handling XA resources has been refined in this release.

As a little heads up for milestone 4, in that release we are looking to drop the first cut of our new XATMI deployable artifacts for JBoss module, along with supporting a pluggable transport layer.

Hope you like it,
Tom

Blacktie advert

Tom and the team have been doing a great job with Blacktie since we acquired it. So I was watching one of those "classic advert" programs the other day on TV and wondered what a Blacktie one would look like just for a piece of fun.

BlackTie@JBoss Virtual Conference 2009

Good Evening BlackTie fans,

Just wanted to post to let you know that we will be helping to man the JB.org booth at this years JBoss Virtual Conference 2009. If you haven't registered yet there's still time to register.

We should be on the JB.org for most of the day so if you haven't joined us on our IRC channel yet, this will be a great opportunity for us to hear your questions and suggestions.

Looking forward to seeing you there!
Tom

Working with Blacktie

Following our previous wiki articles on building and deploying the Blacktie framework, we have now created an albeit brief guide to how to use our build tools to create Blacktie server and client executables.

We've also created another article aimed at those who are interested in getting started with developing the framework itself.

If you're interested you can check out our new articles on the jboss.org wiki:
Developing Blacktie
Building Blacktie Servers and Clients

Hopefully these should be of help to you!
Tom

Blacktie Milestone 1 Binaries Uploaded

Greetings to our regular Blacktie viewers and welcome to those readers new to the blog!

Today marks the first binary release of the Blacktie project which can be downloaded from here...

We have also updated our Wiki with a new article describing what you can do once you have acquired a binary distribution from jboss.org or built it yourself.

The article is intended to get you up and running with our provided examples and tell you how to install the required third party components.

Finally for those completionists out there, we have added a new tag into the repository, Blacktie_1_0_M1_CR2 which has the tweaks in the build system to add the third party shared libraries to the binary distribution.

Until next time,
Tom

Welcome to the JBoss Blacktie party

We are proud to announce the first milestone release of the JBoss Blacktie product. Blacktie allows the user to easily migrate their existing XATMI applications from any existing provider onto the open source JBoss application server with no re-writing of existing XATMI code.

This release marks the first opportunity that XATMI developers have been able to freely download an open source XATMI provider for use in any of their solutions.

If you would like to know more, please visit our wiki at:
https://www.jboss.org/community/docs/DOC-13231

Our project page is not available just yet, but will be accessed from:
http://www.jboss.org/blacktie