The week ending 20 February 2011 saw the croci push their noggins up from earth, and some work occurred in the larger TorqueBox ecosystem.

About the box

This week we added two talks to the list of places you can hear about TorqueBox from live humans. We have our Polish friends Tomek Szymanski and Adam Warski to thank for both newly-added talks. They are founders of Software Mill (and former employees of JBoss) and use TorqueBox with Java CDI in their products.

Adam and Tomek will be presenting on the 8th of March at the Poznan JUG. Adam will then be presenting on the 16th of April at java4people.

Additionally, Toby Crawley submitted a proposal to RailsConf. We think this would be a great opportunity to spread the word.

Inside the box

Toby Crawley continued to work with the backgroundable tasks stuff, trying to resolve a few lingering edge-case idiosyncrasies.

Lance started the integration work between TorqueBox and the PicketBox security project. Instead of pulling random authentication gems into your application, you'll soon be able to leverage container-managed security. Build your application, not your infrastructure.

Jim started working with Infinispan integration into TorqueBox. This should allow even better implicit caching, along with providing a NoSQL data-store for general use.

Around the box

This week Ben Browning spent some time looking at the performance of TorqueBox in comparison to other alternatives (both JRuby and MRI). We hope to have results published in the upcoming week. All of the performance-testing stuff is kept in GitHub, because we want to stay honest, and give everyone a chance to reproduce or augment our testing.

Ben also reworked some of messaging documentation, including more details about synchronous queue usage.

I (Bob) continued Lance's work related to both StompBox and easy-to-use TorqueBox AMIs. Work continues on these, but the idea is that it will be one click to launch a StompBox-enabled AMI, and start deploying your applications.

Additionally, I (Bob) finished up the slimming of the distribution. It currently stands a shade under 50% the size (180mb) of the previous 1.0.0.Beta23 release (361mb).

Overall, it was a good, productive, low-key week.