The OW2 Consortium - formed in January 2007 from the merger of the ObjectWeb and OrientWare open source communities - has added comprehensive, dynamic clustering support and a new batch of administration tools to support distributed applications in the latest version of its JOnAS application server, Version 4.8 Enterprise Edition.

"The new release provides high scale availability in a clustered environment so an application running on top of Jonas can survive even when machines go down. It keeps the process alive and replicated," OW2 Consortium chairman Jean Pierre Laisné, said.

JOnAS 4.8 EE, which has been under development for around six years, is an ideal foundation for building new wave Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications. "It provides innovative, enterprise class J2EE-based solutions and will help enterprises get the maximum benefit from new technologies like SOA."

It also includes a Thread Management Framework (for thread monitoring and control) and a rather grandly titled Fractal Deployment Framework to deploy JOnAS software. Further features to support clustering management and monitoring are under development in the OW2 JASMINe project.

Laisné says another important development for OW2 is the expansion of the JOnAS development community to include contributors from emerging technology hotspots such as China and Brazil. OW2 claims it now has some 100 or so organisations with 6,000 developers working on more than 100 open source projects under its wing.

"We are particularly excited about the involvement of developers from China and Brazil where open source solutions are really taking off," Laisné says.

JOnAS training and support services are available from Bull under the terms of Bull's Open Energy offer. ®

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