IronJacamar

IronJacamar 1.1.0.Final released

August 6th, 2013

I'm very proud to announce IronJacamar 1.1.0.Final, the first stable release of our IronJacamar 1.1 series.

Only minor issues were found during our CR2 testing, so the release are small. Full release notes are here .

IronJamamar 1.1

IronJacamar is an implementation of the Java EE Connector Architecture 1.7 specification featured in the Java EE 7 Full Profile.

Java EE Connector Architecture (JCA) defines a standard architecture for connecting the Java EE platform to heterogeneous Enterprise Information Systems (EIS), like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), database and messaging systems.

IronJacamar 1.1 is the second major feature release, which brings a lot of new functionality to the Java EE Connector Architecture community.

The major new features includes

Lets do a run through.

Java EE Connector Architecture 1.7

The Java Connector Architecture 1.7 specification adds the following areas:

So, this would be considered a small update to the Java EE Connector Architecture specification in order to align with some of the new functionality in Java EE 7, especially for JMS 2.0.

Lazy connection manager

A lazy connection manager allows the JCA container to move a physical connection to an Enterprise Information System from one logical connection handle to another logical connection handle.

The logical connection handle is the connection that the Java EE application interacts with, while the physical connection handle is the real connection controlled by the JCA container.

This means that there can be more logical connection handles than physical ones - so basically the physical connections are multiplexed between the logical ones when needed, say 1000 logical connections to 100 physical connections.

You can read more about this optional Java EE Connector Architecture feature in chapter 7.16.

Distributed work manager

A distributed workmanager is able to execute a

javax.resource.spi.work.DistributableWork

instance on any node in the cluster where the associated resource adapter is deployed, and configured in the same way.

This allows more optimal use of the JCA based resources across the entire cluster.

The "when" and "where" is defined by policies and selectors configured on the DistributedWorkManager instance, f.ex. a policy of "Always" and a selector of "PingTime" will always send the work instance to the node which has the lowest ping time - excluding the node where the work instance was submitted to of course.

Read more about the DistributedWorkManager in chapter 10.3.11 of the specification.

Advanced pools

Capacity policies and additional flush strategies have been added to the connection pool backing the physical connections.

A capacity policy defines how a pool grows or shrinks when either being asked for a connection, or triggered by the idle connection scanner.

This means that you can get your pool to grow by 2 connections if none are available, leading to not having the connection overhead for the next incoming request. Same goes for shrinking where you can remove all idle connections in the pool in order to limit resources spent.

Tooling

IronJacamar 1.1 saw a lot of tooling improvements.

The integration with modern testing methods using Arquillian and ShrinkWrap are now much easy to use with our embedded JCA environment, leading to easier unit test for resource adapters. Especially since we now have an Enterprise Information System testing server which can eliminate the need to actually have the real Enterprise Information System installed.

This is also made available by a new IronJacamar Eclipse plugin.

Last, but not least, there is a tool for getting valuable information about a resource adapter, and tools for migrating old configuration files.

Our user guide contains much more information about these subjects, so check it out.

The Road Ahead

Planning for IronJacamar 2.0 has begun, but first more importantly:

Champagne !!

Please, raise your glass, and celebrate with us.

Last, but not least - A HUGE shout-out to our community and developers who helped with this release. You know who you are !

On behalf of the IronJacamar community,
    Jesper

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