Monday, March 8, 2010

Deployed and running in under 2 minutes...

Greetings BlackTie fans,

We just wanted to let you know one of the projects main focus at the moment is to work on ease of use and managements. To that end we have reworked our Deploying BlackTie article over on the wiki with a challenge of sorts :D

The idea is that given a suitable baseline machine (say Fedora or Windows) and a few pre-requisites (Java, Maven and Ant, nothing too adventurous) then it should be possible to get BlackTie installed and running in only two minutes. When we say running, we mean having ran all the example programs too!

How is this possible you might ask? Have we removed most of the examples? No! What we have done is provided a small script that will automatically run all of the samples that we ship! Call it an aide memoire of sorts so you don't need to recall and type all of the build commands from the off.

Hope it is of help to you all!
Tom

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

BlackTie 2.0 MR2 Released!

Greetings BlackTie fans,

As I am sure you will know, it is that time again when we release the latest and greatest version of BlackTie!

This time we focussed on the following:
1. Adding support for IBM DB2
2. Increasing the monitoring statistics available to BlackTie administrators
3. Altering the build to allow the native artifacts to be separated by a platform/architecture classifier.
4. Upgrading to the latest release of ACE and log4cxx

Another couple of more minor changes we have made are to; include the libstomp source code into atmibroker-hybrid so that we can add some more debug to it - hopefully we will put back these changes in the future, add the jboss.org maven repository so no need to import the jboss dependencies by hand, plus, we have had to make another slight change to one of the apr headers for compatibility with ACE+TAO.

These changes mean:
1. Its definitely going to be best to build from clean (mvn clean)
2. You now need to use a platform-architecture qualifier (-Dbpa=...) when building any of the C/C++ modules (see the build notes for more details: https://www.jboss.org/community/wiki/BuildingBlacktie)
3. You will need to download the latest version of log4cxx, and ACE as per the build instructions
4. You will need to edit apr.h as specified in the build instructions
5. You will need to reimport the third party dependencies

If you don't mind rebuilding everything from scratch, I would suggest that you remove your ~/.m2 folders before importing the new third party dependencies and building BlackTie.

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)

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

The release notes are at: http://www.jboss.org/blacktie/release.html

As always, 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

Monday, December 7, 2009

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

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

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

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

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

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

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

Thursday, April 9, 2009

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