JBoss ESB 4.0 final community release is slated for December 2006. This version is meant for customers, partners, and early adopters who want to start using and open source ESB or designing proof of concept. The next version of JBoss ESB is slated for mid-2007 and will be supported with JBoss subscriptions. JBoss Application Server 5.0 beta1 is out now. A final release of JBoss App Server 5.0 with Java EE 5.0 certification is targeted for 1H 2007. New features/technologies in JBoss App Server 5.0 include:

• JBoss Web Services. A JAX-RPC 1.1 compliant SOAP stack custom built for the JBoss Application Server architecture, JBoss Web Services now supports all Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) compliant web services, including WS4EE 1.1, WS-I Basic Profile 1.1, and WS-Security 1.0. In addition, developers can leverage annotation-driven web services (JSR-181), a new feature in Java EE 5.0, to simplify the creation of web services on JBoss Application Server. JBoss Web Services is compatible with Microsoft.NET.
• JBoss Clustering. Re-architected to better conserve memory and resources while improving overall performance, scalability, and reliability, JBoss Clustering now supports both fine-grained and buddy replication. Since fine-grained replication replicates only values changed within an object, it minimizes network traffic and provides a scalable way to share objects across a cluster of servers. Buddy replication, on the other hand, offers the ability to replicate cached objects to specific servers within a cluster. As a result, network traffic and memory are both minimized while ensuring failover of the collective state of the cluster, even if some servers go down.
• JBoss Messaging. JBoss Messaging is a fully compatible JMS 1.1 implementation and substantially improves high availability features such as distributed destinations, in-memory replication of the messages and transparent client failover. A re-implementation of JBossMQ, JBoss Messaging can be used with JBoss Application Server 4.0.5 and will be the default messaging platform in JBoss Application Server 5.0.
• JBoss Seam. JBoss has quickly delivered new features to JBoss Seam, its innovative unified component programming model and framework. New features in JBoss Seam 1.1 include data-oriented application wrappers for entity beans, integration with Ajax4jsf, support for atomic conversations which greatly reduce database roundtrips, exception handling via annotations, ability to integrate RESTful pages into stateful page flow, and a new concurrency model for AJAX-based applications.
• JBoss EJB3 (Enterprise JavaBeans). JBoss Application Server's implementation of EJB 3.0 has been updated to reflect the final specification including Java Annotation support for Session Beans, Message driven Beans, and Entity Beans as well as a simplified persistence model based on Hibernate.
• Hibernate. Announced last month, Hibernate 3.2 is one of the first object/relational mapping software to be compliant with Java Persistence, which was introduced in Java EE 5.0 to simplify the development of applications using data persistence. Hibernate 3.2 is now integrated with JBoss Application Server, providing developers with a Java Persistence provider out of the box.

JBoss App Server 5.0 will be based on a new microcontainer, a refactoring of the JBoss JMX Microkernel, which provides a scalable POJO-based foundation that further improves AS5's ability to provide its services for high-end, clustered enterprise environments and lower-end, resource restricted environments, such as networked appliances. JBoss Microcontainer can support deployment configurations within unit tests, standalone Java applications and third-party Java application servers. As far as the Red Hat "forking" of JBoss, some have suggested that it's much like what Red Hat did with their branded Enterprise Linux and Fedora. RHEL is the supported, paid version, and Fedora is the more open, source-code available, less-certified version made available for free. Regarding this being the possible future of JBoss, a JBoss representative said:

All of the open source projects on JBoss.org (www.jboss.org) operate with a release early, release often philosophy that is very similar in nature to Fedora. These JBoss projects release technologies that give our community, customers, partners, and other early adopters the ability to leverage the latest innovations as soon as possible. We are looking to improve our distribution model for enterprises and partners who rely on the products within the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite (JEMS). These improvements will focus on integrating, testing, and packaging various platform distributions that match how most customers and partners want to consume JEMS products. These new distributions will be created in a way that preserves the spirit, innovation, and independence of the JBoss.org community. The first great example of this is the Red Hat Application Stack. This new offering includes JBoss AS and Hibernate, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the Apache Web Server, and open source databases all in a single distribution that is easy to subscribe to and manage.

A final release of JBoss App Server 5.0 with Java EE 5.0 certification is targeted for 1H 2007.

For an official certification a Java EE 5 application server has to include a JSF 1.2 implementation. Currently there is none available except for the RI and it doesn't seem the myfaces guys are in a real hurry with their JSF 1.2 compatible version. So this makes me wonder, will JBoss just bundle the RI then or will something else happen?

A final release of JBoss App Server 5.0 with Java EE 5.0 certification is targeted for 1H 2007.

For an official certification a Java EE 5 application server has to include a JSF 1.2 implementation. Currently there is none available except for the RI and it doesn't seem the myfaces guys are in a real hurry with their JSF 1.2 compatible version.

So this makes me wonder, will JBoss just bundle the RI then or will something else happen?

Currect, JBoss 5 integrates the JSF RI.

For an official certification a Java EE 5 application server has to include a JSF 1.2 implementation.

The full skinny on the JSF 1.2 support in JBoss 5 is here: http://wiki.jboss.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=JBossWithJSFCDDL Also see http://wiki.jboss.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=JBossFaces Stan

We are looking to implement an ESB to address our integration needs (JMS and Web Services between several applications) in the next few months and wondered if JBossESB was worth considering. I have used Tibco and Mule in the past but seeing as we already use JBossAS to deploy most of our apps and are using or planning to use Hibernate, jBPM and jRules as well it would be great if we could consolidate. Integration needs would be relatively simple to begin with but will grow over time and I was hoping that the JBossESB would have matured by then and would offer the nice bits like tooling and a richer feature set. Any thoughts ?

We are looking to implement an ESB to address our integration needs (JMS and Web Services between several applications) in the next few months and wondered if JBossESB was worth considering.
I have used Tibco and Mule in the past but seeing as we already use JBossAS to deploy most of our apps and are using or planning to use Hibernate, jBPM and jRules as well it would be great if we could consolidate. Integration needs would be relatively simple to begin with but will grow over time and I was hoping that the JBossESB would have matured by then and would offer the nice bits like tooling and a richer feature set. Any thoughts ?

Take a look at the 4.0 release when it comes out. It may not have everything in there that you want, but we've a very active community and with pretty aggressive cycles. Feedback is always welcome and so is more community involvement.

I was using the embeddable EJB 3.0 for the last two months. I've to say the it is awesome. If the new AS is similar, jboss made an excellent move.

I was using the embeddable EJB 3.0 for the last two months. I've to say the it is awesome. If the new AS is similar, jboss made an excellent move.

Yeah, we're going to rename it from embeddable EJB 3.0 to Embeddable JBoss and really expand its scope. Classloading is an "aspect" in the new kernel and it should be as easy as removing this aspect to use the plain Java classpath and JBoss 5 in a Java SE environment.

I was using the embeddable EJB 3.0 for the last two months. I've to say the it is awesome. If the new AS is similar, jboss made an excellent move.

Yeah, we're going to rename it from embeddable EJB 3.0 to Embeddable JBoss and really expand its scope. Classloading is an "aspect" in the new kernel and it should be as easy as removing this aspect to use the plain Java classpath and JBoss 5 in a Java SE environment.

I'm a 'hardcore' Spring user. I'm looking very seriously the embeddable Jboss with the possibility to use Seam on top of it.

I was using the embeddable EJB 3.0 for the last two months. I've to say the it is awesome. If the new AS is similar, jboss made an excellent move.

Yeah, we're going to rename it from embeddable EJB 3.0 to Embeddable JBoss and really expand its scope. Classloading is an "aspect" in the new kernel and it should be as easy as removing this aspect to use the plain Java classpath and JBoss 5 in a Java SE environment.

I'm a 'hardcore' Spring user. I'm looking very seriously the embeddable Jboss with the possibility to use Seam on top of it.

Why use embeddable JBoss if you're writing a Seam app? Why not just use JBoss app server and slim it down to what you want? (Our installer should help greatly there). There are a lot of boottime optimizations we are planning to do like serializing metadata so that it doesn't have to be parsed from XML again. Bill

I was using the embeddable EJB 3.0 for the last two months. I've to say the it is awesome. If the new AS is similar, jboss made an excellent move.

Yeah, we're going to rename it from embeddable EJB 3.0 to Embeddable JBoss and really expand its scope. Classloading is an "aspect" in the new kernel and it should be as easy as removing this aspect to use the plain Java classpath and JBoss 5 in a Java SE environment.

I'm a 'hardcore' Spring user. I'm looking very seriously the embeddable Jboss with the possibility to use Seam on top of it.

Why use embeddable JBoss if you're writing a Seam app? Why not just use JBoss app server and slim it down to what you want? (Our installer should help greatly there). There are a lot of boottime optimizations we are planning to do like serializing metadata so that it doesn't have to be parsed from XML again.

Bill

Because now I'm working in a project for a credit card company and they have the "IBM KIT". Mainframes, O.S, DBMS and of course AS are IBM products. So, I can't use JBoss :(

One thing not posted here is that JBoss 5 now ships with JBoss TS (the transaction manager we purchased from Arjuna). This supports full recovery and logging.

Bill, Why is JBoss supporting JAX-RPC 1.1 when that is correctly stated as a J2EE specification, though it is not a JEE5 specification. Where is JAX-WS support? I see that JBoss is not on the expert committee for JAX-WS, which is the replacement for JAX-RPC. Don't get me wrong, I am a huge proponent of JAX web services, but it seems you guys are positioning an older set of technologies for an app server release that is already months behind Glassfish and Sun's app server - - is there a technical limitation in your ESB, Transaction Mgr., etc...? douglas dooley http://douglasdooley.blogspot.com/

JBoss is now Red Hat Middleware so it is part of the expert committee, but I still want to know about JAX-WS support...

Douglas, Sorry the description wasn't accurate. JBoss 5 beta includes JBoss Web Services 2.0.0.CR2, which does have JAX-WS support. As you noted we were on the EC for this spec, and we are very much behind it. Also, we have supported the core JSR-181 annotation subset of JAX-WS (@WebService) since 4.0.4. Thanks, -Jason

Douglas,

Sorry the description wasn't accurate. JBoss 5 beta includes JBoss Web Services 2.0.0.CR2, which does have JAX-WS support. As you noted we were on the EC for this spec, and we are very much behind it. Also, we have supported the core JSR-181 annotation subset of JAX-WS (@WebService) since 4.0.4.

Thanks,
-Jason

We also have had preview releases for EJB3 and JPA for a long time as well(2 years), but as you know we cannot productize these things until a) Sun creates a CTS and b) we pass the CTS. Many of our users and paying customers, in fact, have decided to use these preview implementations in production. Bill

The original post from Joseph is partially incorrect with respect to JAXRPC-1.1. Althoug we support JAXRPC it misses the (exciting) fact that we now also support JAXWS. In jbossas-5.0.0.Beta2 we include jbossws-2.0.0.CR2 which provides support for JAXWS-2.0. jbossws-2.0.x is backwards compatible such that can use your (old) JAXRPC J2EE-1.4 compliant web service endpoints/clients with the new release. As far as participation in the JCP process for JAXWS goes. I am a member of the expert commitee (JSR224, JSR261) on behalf of JBoss for about two years now. Generally we are very much behind the JAXWS spec and you can expect a fully (CTS) compliant release in Q1/2007. We also expect to be able to backport this release to jbossas-4.2.x to make JAXWS functionality available to our customers that cannot upgrade their environments to jbossas-5.0.x cheers -thomas xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Thomas Diesler Web Service Lead JBoss, a division of Red Hat xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Did JBoss pull a Red Hat or not?