content/january2008.mdtext - tomee-site - Git at Google

 Title: January2008
 The release of OpenEJB 3.0 beta 1 at the end of September showed an mild
 but noticeable increase in user traffic which has continued since.  Several
 usability improvements and related new features have been added,
 particularly around a returning user from years ago Alex St. Croix.  Alex
 has already written some blog entries, created a couple video tutorials,
 and has a downloadable PDF of using OpenEJB embedded in Tomcat which is a
 dozen pages and growing.  This is all very good for OpenEJB and we are very
 excited to see user activity of this nature again.

 Web Services support has been added to OpenEJB in both standalone and
 Tomcat embedded modes, and significant work has been contributed to the CXF
 project as a result to add new features required by OpenEJB but not already
 present, such as rpc/encoded web services.

 The ability to embed OpenEJB into Tomcat has been re-expanded from
 temporarily just supporting Tomcat 6.0 to now version 5.5 as well including
 annotation processing support which is usually a v6.0.x and higher feature.
  Support for older versions was lost when the integration was reworked and
 improved over the OpenEJB 1.0 approach, however post OpenEJB 3.0 beta 1
 release, requests from users of older Tomcat versions began coming in
 showing that the ability to support pre Tomcat 6 users is still very
 important.

 The documentation has been reorganized significantly.  A new confluence
 space as been created dedicated entirely to the OpenEJB 3.0.x codebase and
 reintegrated back into the main website.  Several new examples have been
 created as well.  A major issue with the documentation was that most of the
 new documents weren't linked into the main site, were just loose pages, and
 had no "center" to bind them all together.  The creation of dedicated 3.0.x
 space with it's own index and new left navigation section has dramatically
 improved this.

 Jonathan Gallimore, a newer contributor, recently contributed another large
 patch to the Eclipse plugin he's been working on that takes an EJB 2.x
 application and adds the annotations to the source code required to turn it
 into an EJB 3.0 application, removing the equivalent xml as it goes.
 Jonathan has done great work, but we could be doing better as he is largely
 working alone and isn't getting the benefit of working closely with
 existing committers.  It's always difficult to pull people in when there
 isn't a strong intersection with existing code/people.

 Release work on OpenEJB 3.0 beta 2 has begun.  There was a perpetual state
 of "going to release" through late November and all December, however all
 the open issues have been cleared and the general mood is "it's
 over-ready."  We've branched and have begun helping other projects to
 release some of the things we have dependencies on such as the Geronimo
 Transaction Manager/Connector and the XBean libraries.	All is going well
 and we should see  OpenEJB 3.0 beta 2 put up for vote this month.

 On a general note, OpenEJB celebrated it's eighth year of existence in December.  As a personal comment from someone who's been on the project the entire time, I \[David Blevins\](david-blevins\.html)
  have never seen the project in such good shape.  A major challenge going
 forward will be releasing the 3.0 final and getting OpenEJB back on
 people's radar.
	Title: January2008
	The release of OpenEJB 3.0 beta 1 at the end of September showed an mild
	but noticeable increase in user traffic which has continued since. Several
	usability improvements and related new features have been added,
	particularly around a returning user from years ago Alex St. Croix. Alex
	has already written some blog entries, created a couple video tutorials,
	and has a downloadable PDF of using OpenEJB embedded in Tomcat which is a
	dozen pages and growing. This is all very good for OpenEJB and we are very
	excited to see user activity of this nature again.

	Web Services support has been added to OpenEJB in both standalone and
	Tomcat embedded modes, and significant work has been contributed to the CXF
	project as a result to add new features required by OpenEJB but not already
	present, such as rpc/encoded web services.

	The ability to embed OpenEJB into Tomcat has been re-expanded from
	temporarily just supporting Tomcat 6.0 to now version 5.5 as well including
	annotation processing support which is usually a v6.0.x and higher feature.
	Support for older versions was lost when the integration was reworked and
	improved over the OpenEJB 1.0 approach, however post OpenEJB 3.0 beta 1
	release, requests from users of older Tomcat versions began coming in
	showing that the ability to support pre Tomcat 6 users is still very
	important.

	The documentation has been reorganized significantly. A new confluence
	space as been created dedicated entirely to the OpenEJB 3.0.x codebase and
	reintegrated back into the main website. Several new examples have been
	created as well. A major issue with the documentation was that most of the
	new documents weren't linked into the main site, were just loose pages, and
	had no "center" to bind them all together. The creation of dedicated 3.0.x
	space with it's own index and new left navigation section has dramatically
	improved this.

	Jonathan Gallimore, a newer contributor, recently contributed another large
	patch to the Eclipse plugin he's been working on that takes an EJB 2.x
	application and adds the annotations to the source code required to turn it
	into an EJB 3.0 application, removing the equivalent xml as it goes.
	Jonathan has done great work, but we could be doing better as he is largely
	working alone and isn't getting the benefit of working closely with
	existing committers. It's always difficult to pull people in when there
	isn't a strong intersection with existing code/people.

	Release work on OpenEJB 3.0 beta 2 has begun. There was a perpetual state
	of "going to release" through late November and all December, however all
	the open issues have been cleared and the general mood is "it's
	over-ready." We've branched and have begun helping other projects to
	release some of the things we have dependencies on such as the Geronimo
	Transaction Manager/Connector and the XBean libraries. All is going well
	and we should see OpenEJB 3.0 beta 2 put up for vote this month.

	On a general note, OpenEJB celebrated it's eighth year of existence in December. As a personal comment from someone who's been on the project the entire time, I \[David Blevins\](david-blevins\.html)
	have never seen the project in such good shape. A major challenge going
	forward will be releasing the 3.0 final and getting OpenEJB back on
	people's radar.