Wednesday 20 November 2013

happy 1st birthday hawtio! Welcome to hawtio 1.2.0!

Its exactly a year ago today I hacked the first commit of hawtio, the lightweight and modular HTML5 console for Java thats hawt.  As Claus just said, Happy Birthday hawtio!

Its been an amazing ride, its hard to believe its been just a year! A huge thanks to the hawtio team and everyone who's helped turn hawtio into a truly amazing console.

hawtio's really growing up fast and getting more awesome by the day. It constantly surprises me the awesomeness the hawtio team keep on adding.

Highlights of the year

The highlights of the year for me are:

  • lots and lots of plugins are now available for working with JVMs, JMX, logging and many frameworks like Apache Camel, Apache ActiveMQ, Infinispan, ElasticSearch and OSGi
  • Apache ActiveMQ 5.9.x or later now ships with hawtio inside
  • Apache Camel folks have effectively deprecated the old camel console in favour of hawtio
  • JBoss A-MQ and JBoss Fuse 6.1 is coming with hawtio as the default Fuse Management Console
  • hawtio works great stand alone or in most containers now like Apache Karaf, Apache Tomcat, Jetty and Widfly
Pretty much all aspects of the console is pretty awesome already; here's a few edited highlights:
  • in Camel we can visualise real time visualisations of running Camel routes inside a JVM, see the metrics update in real time, visually design camel routes, and trace or debug running routes
  • in ActiveMQ we can see all the queues, topics and metrics; create queues/topics, browse queues, on 5.9.x we can resend DLQ messages, move messages from a queue to another queue, delete messages, send messages and see destination consumer/producer diagrams. When using Fuse 6.1 we can visually design clustered broker topologies (e.g. for geographic store and forward networks).
  • in OSGi there is support for all main aspects; from viewing bundles, features, Config Admin, declarative services, viewing services, packages, dependency graphs, diagnosing class loading issues, navigating from bundle to maven metadata to source/javadoc, to using the Karaf shell from a browser.
  • when using JBoss Fuse 6.1 then hawtio becomes a full featured UI for working with many containers in a fabric; creating containers, editing profiles, looking inside runtimes, browsing logs etc.
One of my personal favourite features: when using the insight-log library from Fuse (or when using Fuse), the log plugin links all log statements and methods in each stack trace to the exact line of source code that generated the log statement or exception! Thats hawt

Or being able to search maven repositories and view versions, source or javadoc from inside the browser. Also the interactive developer help is pretty cute; so you can play around with all of hawtio's angularjs directives in the browser ;)

Getting Started

I don't think you truly understand how awesome hawtio is until you start using it really. So get started today!

We love contributions so please dive in and help; even if its just ideas for how to make things even more awesome. 

hawtio is built on AngularJS; I've used many different UI and web frameworks over the years (most of them TBH) and I really can't recommend AngularJS highly enough. So if you fancy learning AngularJS, why not try hacking a new plugin or adding some functionality to an existing plugin you like? There's lots of ideas already if you're not sure what to do.

Check out the developer guide for more details on getting started and building the code.

hawtio 1.2.0 released!

To celebrate hawtio's first birthday we've just released 1.2.0 today! It should be sync'd to maven central in the next hour or two. 

There are 407 issues fixed in this release (most of them new features or improvements I might add!)

So what are you waiting for? Go get it while its hawt!

Don't cha wish your console was hawt like hawtio?