Red Hat Clarifies Its JBoss Vision - Software Development Times On The Web

Red Hat Clarifies Its JBoss Vision
By Alex Handy

July 1, 2006 — JBoss, now a division of Red Hat, has clarified its vision of the future, which includes a simplified development model and new middleware stacks from its new parent company. The news was unveiled at its JBoss World user conference in mid-June.

The show saw the release of Seam 1.0, an SOA application framework based on Java EE that incorporates AJAX, JSF, EJB 3 and other technologies.

“We look at it as Web 2.0 meets SOA,” said Shaun Connolly, vice president of product management at JBoss. Seam is the product of Hibernate creator Gavin King, now with JBoss.

“[SOA] needs to be ubiquitous. It needs to have a simple programming model,” said Connolly, “and that’s really what Seam’s charter in life is. Where you’re building process-driven applications or AJAX portlets that plug into a portal architecture, or using EJB 3.0—all those should have a very similar component model and a similar development paradigm.”

Connolly said that the Seam Java EE 5 application framework is built for rapid development and total Web integration. Connolly said that much of what King learned from working on Seam 1.0 will be translated into the recently approved JSR 299 for Web Beans.

That JSR, which seeks to reconcile JavaServer Faces with EJB 3.0, was approved unanimously by an executive committee in early June.

System, Heal Thyself
JBoss also announced plans to open the source code for JBoss Operations Network (JBoss ON) management tools sometime later this year. Connolly said that by opening the source for JBoss ON—a product he characterized as a self-healing system—he expects to foster compatibility between JBoss ON and other middleware and monitoring software.

Those self-healing systems, said Connolly, also are an important part of the future of Red Hat and JBoss.

“I think the more interesting stuff is what Red Hat’s doing with virtualization. When you pair that with the management capabilities, you get very compelling information. Some of the technology is starting to get to where it can drive new virtual nodes and provision those nodes in more of a virtualized environment, so you can get true resource sharing,” said Connolly.

That, he added, means that in times of heavy loads, JBoss ON should eventually be able to administer and expand the server capabilities it is managing. If a system dies, the JBoss management tools will eventually be able to compensate by starting up a new virtual server on the grid and assigning it to pick up the slack.

JBoss also introduced a certified partner program to address what it says is an increased usage and demand for JEMS in financial services, government, telecommunications and travel industries. Certified partners will provide JBoss customers with technology, integration and migration services, and certify applications or tools for the JEMS environment.

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