Red Hat's JBoss Middleware division released the JBoss Application Server 7 earlier this week. We caught up with Craig Muzilla, vice president and general manager of the Middleware business unit at Red Hat, and asked him what this update means for the platform as a whole.

EE 6 is all about laying the foundation for modularity for the platform, through the new Profiles. How is JBoss taking advantage of this?

What we're announcing next. JBoss Application Server 7. At the core of this is a micro-services container. We came out years ago with the concept of a micro-kernel. JBoss EAP 5.0 came out with the idea of a micro-container on top of the Java Virtual Machine. Now we have this concept of more modularity. If you have transactionality in JTA [Java Transaction API], or caching, or messaging, or clustering, or security, all of these services can be added or subtracted easily from the micro-services container.

The other thing this does is allowed us to add a lot more manageability capabilities. We're extending the API so that the platform container can be more easily managed without having to bring in something hard-coded. You can manage and configure and deploy this environment much more easily. We're doing a lot for flexibility for the developer, but also for the operational excellence and managing it after the fact.

We have a profile which is essentially Tomcat, slimmed down. It's just the servlet engine, but then you begin to build on top of that by adding services with micro-services containers. The problem with Tomcat is that it's really simple and easy to deploy, but the problem is if you need to scale it up and add services, thats not so easy. If you need transactionality, if you need highly distributed caching capability, you can't do it easily with Tomcat.

I'd say Tomcat is still healthy. It seems like from the market research data we have, show that its usage hasn't declined, but it hasn't increased either. What these other vendors (Mulesoft, SpringSource) are doing is, they all need a container. With Mule, their ESB needs a container, but if you need it to be more than the runtime environment for the ESB, you will not have services to do that. I think that's the dilemma. Some of these companies are offering their own Tomcat versions, but can that be a rich environment or not?

How goes the work on Java 7, both SE and EE?

We participate in the JCP Executive Committee and in the expert working groups for Java EE 7, and for SE. We participated in the recent EE 7 announcement. In terms of SE 7, we are on the expert group for that. We're feeding in our comments and making sure we're part of the process. We are also the number one contributor, outside of Oracle, to OpenJDK. We have quite a few people working just on OpenJDK. We have had a Test Compatibility Kit (TCK) compliant Java for around 4 or 5 years now, and we ship it with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We plan on continuing that tradition, and we're fully behind OpenJDK. I think what is uncertain is what happens beyond the OpenJDK, in terms of what Oracle does.

They may package up another distro based on OpenJDK, with Hotspot and Jrockit. What types of add-ons will they put in that environment? From the market standpoint, they said they want to add value on top of Java, but I think it's unclear where they're going to go. We want to make sure the specification itself and the reference implementation is nice, and strong, and healthy, and has all the capabilities at a base level that everyone at the marketplace will need.

Tell us about Cloud Forms and Open Shift.

We recently announced Cloud Forms, and OpenShift, which is our platform as a service offering.

The JBoss product line is bringing together all these pieces we have and offering them as services in OpenShift. People can use us as the engine in their cloud. It doesn't end at the container. Think of an integration service from Salesforce.com to an internal ERP. On top of that, you get busineess process management as a service, and user experience and collaboration as a service.

JBoss Application Server 7 is the engine in our middleware offering in the cloud. This goes live within the next several weeks, and JBoss Application Sever 7 is the engine driving that in OpenShift.

What are your goals for your platform as a service?

I think the primary requirement is making it very accessible and easy and to attract developers from corporations that need to do development in the cloud and bring it back on premises. Also, people who have ancillary applications that are mainstream, so it doesn't make sense to do it on-site, so you do it in the cloud. Why start on premises? Do it in the cloud? For smaller organizations that need Web-based applications, do it right in the platform as a service. I think one of the key requirements is to make it easy for all these audiences to use OpenShift. Second is to make it portable so they can move from cloud to cloud, or cloud to on premises.

We're trying to embrace applications, whether its Spring or EE or Ruby on Rails, or PHP. We embrace all of these, and let the developers use the workload that best suits their needs.

Stepping back a second, I think Red Hat is always looked upon as only a Linux company. But I think, as people get to know us more, they realize we have really a full portfolio of infrastructure as well as development and middleware offerings, and we bring it all to the table. I think it's good for all developers that they understand Red Hat is more than a Linux company. It's a middleware company. It's a management company. It's a cloud company.