Wondering what’s new in Nexus? Just ask the experts.

We’re hosting another Nexus Office Hours this Friday, on Google+ Hangout On Air. Our Nexus experts Brian Fox, Manfred Moser and Rich Seddon will demo the latest in Nexus and dedicate most of the hour to Q&A time with you!

How to join: No registration required, just RSVP on Google+, and the event will appear in your calendar. You can join through your calendar invite or by returning to the event page at the start of the hangout. Be sure to bring your Nexus questions with you. If you can’t make it — be sure to leave your questions on the event page in the comments section and we’ll be sure to answer them during the session. That way you can tune into the recording later, and get your answers!

*Interested in joining our panel that day in the video conference? Sign up for one of the spots on our panel, by leaving us a comment on the event page and we’ll invite you in before we go live. Space is limited, so be sure to sign up early!

Please feel free to pass along this invite to your friends and colleagues.

RSVP

We’re pleased to announce that Sonatype will be hosting Nexus Office Hours each month starting in March! Our Nexus experts Brian Fox, Manfred Moser and Rich Seddon will demo the latest Nexus tips & tricks and will take real-time questions from you!

When: Friday, March 22, 2013 – 1:00-2:00PM EDT (GMT-0400)

Where: In a Google+ Hangout On Air! Once we begin, our hangout will broadcast live to the Nexus Office Hours event page on Google+, as well as our Sonatype YouTube channel.

How: Be sure to RSVP ‘Yes’ on the Nexus Office Hours event page, and this event will be automatically saved to your Gmail calendar and you will receive a reminder just before we start the hangout. Not on Google+? No worries, you can still view the broadcast on the event page or the Sonatype YouTube channel when the hangout begins.

We will be taking real-time questions submitted on the Nexus Office Hours event page, Twitter (please use hashtag #nexusofficehours) and on our YouTube page in the comments section of the broadcast.

**If you’d like to join our panel that day in the hangout, please leave us a comment on this page and the first 6 people will be invited in as the session starts. This event will be recorded and saved to Google+ as well as our YouTube channel.

RSVP Now

We want to hear about your experiences and challenges using open source software in development. Please take 10 minutes and share your thoughts.

In return, you could win Jason’s brand new Apple workstation including a 15″ MacBook Pro with Retina display,  a 27″ Thunderbolt display, an Apple Magic Mouse and an Apple Wireless Keyboard. We’ve also snagged both of his iPad minis. That’s enough loot for 3 winners!

Last year, more than 2,500 of you shared some really interesting information. If you respond to this year’s survey, we’ll give you early access to our findings.

What are you waiting for? Take the survey now. It will take less than 10 minutes. We promise.

*Official Rules for the Sonatype Open Source Survey Promotion can be found here.

Since its release four years ago, Sonatype Nexus has grown to support many repository formats. And most users of build tools including Gradle, Leiningen, SBT and Ant/Ivy have started to realize the numerous benefits of using a repository manager.

Using an MRM has become accepted best practice for Maven users.

The benefits of proxying external repositories and deploying third party artifacts are only the beginning. Things really take off when you start deploying your internal components to Nexus, making them immediately available to everyone.

Nexus: More Than Basic Repository Management

Nexus is evolving to help you manage the security and licensing aspects of your components.  In order to show you how, we have made this a focus of the latest release of the book Repository Management with Nexus.

The book now shows you how to access Insight information for a particular artifact. There are concrete examples on how to inspect and fix security issues, thanks to the information available in your Nexus search results and the linked information on the public security databases.

Note: When you read this, don’t forget to configure your Routing correctly to ensure that aspect of your Component Lifecycle Management (CLM) efforts is covered and no information about internal artifacts leaks to the public.

Part of your effort to get control over your component usage is to secure your sources. Part of that effort is to start using the Central Repository via secured access.

If you are using Nexus Professional this is as easy as upgrading to 2.2 and changing the Remote Storage Location URL. It is also available now for Nexus OSS by getting a $10 token here and making the same changes. Other repository managers will be supported soon.

Nexus 2.2 Now Included in Nexus Book

We have also made improvements and general updates to cover the latest Nexus 2.2 release. Among the topics changed are settings.xml setup explanations, documentation for capabilities, updates to the plugin creation chapter and many more.

Still, with all these improvements we realize that nothing is perfect and you might have questions or ideas for enhancing the book. If that’s the case, we encourage you to file issues with your wishes or attend one of our Nexus training classes. Also, don’t forget that the book is open source and we do take fixes as pull requests.

Component Lifecycle Management is Key

These improvements to Nexus are part of a larger Component Lifecycle Management solution that is provided by Sonatype. CLM helps you ensure the integrity of component-based software by analyzing usage and providing governance and policy enforcement during development.

As demonstrated by these Nexus improvements, CLM is integrated directly into your development infrastructure – including IDE, CI and repository manager tool of choice.

We’re making SSL connectivity to Central available to anyone that downloads open source components regardless of the repository manager. Given the tremendous growth of Central, and the fact that modern applications are largely built from OSS components, this capability is likely to be leveraged by many organizations. SSL has become the standard mechanism for protecting web traffic – across the spectrum of Ecommerce, banking, health care, and so on. Providing SSL support for Central means that your components are no longer susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks that could compromise the component. SSL also eliminates the potential for a hacker to gain visibility into your organization by tracking the components that you download for your development initiatives.

As of Nexus Pro 2.2 (available now), SSL is now the default connectivity option for Nexus Pro users. Because we take security of the ecosystem seriously, we aren’t stopping there, we’re making SSL connectivity to Central available to you even if you aren’t using Nexus Pro.

In order to ensure the highest level of performance for those who count on SSL, we are securing the service with a token. You can get a token for your organization simply by providing a $10 donation that will be donated to open source causes. For the first 60 days all donations will go to the Apache Software Foundation. After that, the donations will go to other open source foundations such as Eclipse. Sonatype will provide a donation on behalf of Nexus Pro customers since we’ve included SSL access to all Pro customers automatically.

If you happen to be using Nexus OSS (any version), support for the SSL token is included already. I’ve already reached out to the Artifactory and Archiva teams and they are working on the changes necessary to enable SSL to Central – we’ll let you know when that support is enabled. If you’re not using a repository manager at all, what are you waiting for?

If you are an existing Nexus Pro customer, you can download the latest release from the support page.

If you would like to make a donation to the open source community and get SSL access, you may do so here.

Have Jenkins (or Hudson) up and running, and want to give Insight for CI plugin a try? The plugin is available in the plugin center and easy to install and configure. — Just add a post build step and configure it to scan (e.g. your build output war file). Get the plugin.

Summary and component results are completely free and will give you a very good indication of the security and license issues (or better their absence) of your software. We’ve even got you covered for manual scans – have a try with Insight App Health Check.

As requested by many attendees, you can download the slides right now. If you already have Jenkins (or Hudson) up and running, you might want to give it a try. The Insight for CI plugin is available in the plugin center and trivial to install and configure. Just add a post build step and configure it to scan e.g. your build output war file. The summary and component results are completely free and will give you a very good indication of the security and license issues (or better their absence) of your software. If you are using a different CI server, you should let us know so we can adjust our priorities. And we even got you covered for manual scans – have a try with Insight App Health Check.

Only a few years ago, Central was a single Dell server running in a Contegix datacenter in St. Louis (you can see it here). From 2007 to 2011 the server was used 12 billion times by 14.3 million unique IP addresses, and since then traffic from a world of developers has only continued to increase. Over the years we’ve invested in both capacity and stability improvements, but today I’m announcing what I consider to be the biggest improvement to date.

Today we announced an agreement with EdgeCast Networks. EdgeCast Networks is a CDN with global reach that we are going to use to both accelerate the delivery and increase the availability of Central. Every Java developer who uses Maven, Gradle, or Ivy (possibly every Java developer in the world) will see immediate improvements in the speed of Central. Index downloads and artifact downloads will be served from one of EdgeCast’s 21 points of presence distributed over four continents. Your builds are going to run faster because of Sonatype’s agreement with EdgeCast.

In addition to this, Sonatype Nexus Pro customers will now have access to end-to-end Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption, bringing a greater level of security to their software development processes.

We’re planning a Sonatype Meetup in New York City on Wednesday, July 25 at 6PM. Jason will be giving an informal talk on the next phase of Apache Maven-based development and how Sonatype is tackling all the hard problems in component lifecycle management. After that, he’ll be giving a sneak peek of our product roadmap for both Nexus and Insight. He’ll be hanging out afterwards to talk shop over drinks and appetizers.

We’ve booked a great space at The Eventi Hotel (851 Avenue of the Americas), but space is limited. If you are in the New York area and interested in attending, please register by completing this form and we will save you a space and send you more details. Hope you can make it!

Reserve Your Seat

With nearly 19,000 active instances of Nexus around the world, we thought we would reach out and ask the community to share their Nexus stories and experiences with us. Over the last six weeks we held our Nexus Stories Contest and we were blown away by the tremendous response we received from around the globe.

Thank you to all of you who took the time to participate. We hope you are all enjoying your wicked awesome Nexus mugs! As promised, we will be sharing your Nexus stories on our blog over the coming weeks.

After the overwhelming response we received, we decided drawing one grand prize winner just wasn’t good enough (plus we love to take advantage of Jason every chance we get). So we decided to draw three grand prize winners!  Our three lucky winners will each be receiving one day of onsite consulting with Jason van Zyl. Our grand prize winners are:

• Alexis Morelle, Colombes, France
• Rueben Jimenez, San Francisco, CA
• Henry Hughes, Los Angeles, CA

Congratulations to our winners and thanks again to everyone who participated!

Stay tuned next week, when we will be sharing some of your stories on what life was like, before Nexus.