Wednesday, August 15, 2007

JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

This past Monday, I did a keynote at the SysCon Real World Java event in New York city. In preparing for that event, I realized that since JBoss was acquired, the news about JBoss has lessoned substantially, and many people are just not aware of what's new at JBoss. So, that is what I titled my presentation, and I focused on several areas. One area was the newly released (July 3, 2007) Enterprise Application Platform 4.2.

Traditionally, the lead product of JBoss was our application server. With the release of the Enterprise Application Platform, what we have done is combine our application server, with Hibernate, EJB 3, JSF, and JBoss Seam, to deliver an integrated application development platform for the enterprise. Now how is this different, and what does it mean to users of the application server?

Well, the application server only contains Hibernate, by default, out of the technologies I listed above, and the AS 4.2.x releases from jboss.org are now community releases that do not have paid for support. Of course, community support, through our forums, is always available just like before.

With the Enterprise Application Platform, you also get the most often used technologies, that used to have to be integrated separately by you, integrated by us, and tested as a whole. No more building of your own distribution with what you need to develop enterprise class applications. Also, the testing of the platform, as a whole, is new, and I will highlight the differences.

With the old AS releases, we have a unit test suite, that you can download and build, and we would run that in our continuous integration builds each day, and when the feature set development, and bug fixes were complete, we would concentrate on getting that test suite to 100% passing, and then release. The test suite was only run with the Sun JVM on a Linux platform (typically RHEL 4 based).

With the new Enterprise Application Platform, we continued to run the unit test suite. But we run it on the Sun JVM, the HP JVM (for HP-UX), and the BEA JRockit JVM, on RHEL 4 and 5, x86 and x86_64, Solaris 9 and 10 (Sparc), HP-UX 11i for PA-RISC and Itanium, and Windows Server 2003, x86 and x86_64. This ensures that more combinations of operating systems and JVM's work before we ship, versus having to deal with customer issues after the fact. We also have more operating systems and JVM's teed up for future updates (AIX and the IBM JVM are examples). We also ran the Hibernate test suite on five different databases. We certified on MySQL 5 (5.0.27), PostgreSQL 8.2.3, Oracle 9i (9.2.0.1), Oracle 10g R2 (10.2.0.1), and SQL Server 2005 (version 9.00.2047). Besides, the unit test suites, we added significant integration testing, that we had never done before internally.

The integration tests, contained tests for EJB 3, HTTP Session replication, JBoss Seam, and in the cases of EJB 3 and JBoss Seam we had performance, scalability and clustering tests. This additional testing led to the discovery of many bugs that we would have only discovered through customer deployment in the past. This is exciting for us, in that we have produced a product with the most complete testing we have ever done, and as a result produced the most hardened distribution for our customers ever! This is truly the dawning of a new age at JBoss!

Besides the new process that we take the Enterprise Application Platform through, the support arrangement has changed as well. We offer three years of support for the Enterprise Application Platform, where we fix all bugs and security errata for customers. For an additional two years we fix only critical bugs and security errata, giving a full five year support cycle to our customers! This is what our customers have been asking for, and we are delivering that to the market now, and will continue to do so with future platform offerings.

So, if you are interesting in this new offering, you will have to contact sales, as there is not a binary download of the Enterprise Application Platform available (you must be a subscriber). The other way you can get the Enterprise Application Platform, is through our developer tools packaged called RHDS (Red Hat Developer Studio). It includes the full binary distribution of the Enterprise Application Platform, and will install that, ready to run as part of the new development environment, which was released as a beta on Monday. Here is the link to that:

http://www.redhat.com/developers/rhds/index.html


Download the developer tools, and play around with the technology. I'm sure you will like what you see!

Enjoy!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Web 2.0 approach to enterprise application development is the first factor that makes our applications bring about a SEA-change.
Regards,
Rosy.
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http://www.axaya.net

Andrig T Miller said...

JBoss Seam is a Web 2.0 framework, but even goes beyond what typically is talked about as Web 2.0. You should definitely check it out.