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.