Meet Fabric8 and video of fabric8 provisioning Apache Tomcat

Recently my fellow colleague Christian Posta wrote two great blog entries about fabric, which I want to share to you.

The new fabric8 logo

In his Meet Fabric8: An open-source integration platform based on Camel and ActiveMQ, Christian introduces us to fabric8, and talks about what fabric8 brings to the table from a DevOps perspective, and some of the other value-adds. Christian also talks about the history of the project.

In his 2nd blog DevOps with Apache Tomcat/TomEE and Fabric8, Christian talks and demonstrates some of the upcoming functionality in the next 1.1 beta7 release, where fabric8 adds support for provision and manage Apache Tomcat, and other containers. Christian recorded a video demonstrating this in action.

We are currently working hard on getting the last pieces into the 1.1 beta7 release which ought to be released this week. We have also worked on revamping the fabric8 website, and working on having the documentation in a nice bookish readable format, and as in PDF as well. The documentation is nicely readable now on handheld devices. I am also putting my touches on improving the quickstarts and examples to provide a lot more documentation and how-to. So expect the documentation, quickstarts, and other examples to have out attention, leading up to the 1.1 release.

We want to do a bunch of beta releases, as this makes it much easier for the community to try out fabric8, and help contribute to the project, before we reach 1.1 final release (ETA sometimes after the summer vacation).

Apache Camel, Groovy and hawtio at gr8conf

Today I presented Apache Camel at the gr8conf, which is a Groovy conference. So in my talk I presented what Camel can do with Groovy today.

Giving a talk about Apache Camel and Groovy at gr8conf 2014 in Copenhagen

The talk was recorded and will be later published by the gr8conf organizers. So keep an eye on their website when that happens.

Being here at the gr8conf is fun and a great event. I love how the groovy community and ecosystem has been able to establish this annual conference, running at its 6 year now. Also I take my hat off for the great people of the groovy team that do the great work on this language, that is now over 10 years old.

In my talk I also demonstrated hawtio which is a great web console, and a project that is fun to work on. So to prepare for gr8conf I developed a plugin example for hatwtio that is a Groovy Shell, so you can execute groovy scripts from the web console.

The source code for the example is in github at: https://github.com/hawtio/hawtio/tree/master/hawtio-plugin-examples/groovy-shell-plugin

And the plugin can easily be installed in Apache Tomcat, Karaf, JBoss Fuse, fabric8 etc.

Custom plugin installed in hawtio running on Apache Tomcat

If you are interested in learning how to build custom plugins for hawtio, then I think the groovy shell plugin is a good example, as it has a bit of backend service, and a simple web page to go with that.

So in my day time work I have great fun working with great technologies like Apache Camel, hawtio, and fabric8. And also a bit fun when I get a chance to work a bit with Groovy too. Anyway I just wanted to say that all these four awesome technologies has something in common. They are created/co-created by a great entrepreneur in our industry.

A slide with 4 great technologies that has something in common ...

Okay there is almost beer'o'clock here at gr8conf, as the organizers have brewed their own groovy beers we are going to taste soon in the scroll bar ;)