Red Hat promises delayed JBoss 'worth the wait'
Refactored and ready for Oracle
Customer Success Testimonial: Recovery is Everything
Red Hat has committed to delivering the delayed next edition of JBoss in the "next several" quarters, promising the wait will be worth it.
JBoss Application Server 5.0, once expected at the start of 2008, will feature a micro kernel and container, support for OSGi, and REST. Support for Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) 5.0 will also be added two years after the spec actually arrived and was added to IBM's WebSphere Application Server 6.1 and the containers used in Oracle's application server core.
The idea for JBoss 5.0 is to be more modular and configurable than the current version. Red Hat has refactored the JBoss code base so the individual services work as stand-alone components and to break down the Java EE monolith.
It's this work that vice president of Red Hat middleware Craig Muzilla said both delayed the launch and would give JBoss an edge over early leads established by Oracle and IBM. Muzilla claims the companies have failed to undertake such a thorough refactoring as Red Hat.
"We are better off [than rivals] because we bit the bullet - everything will interoperate," he said ahead of this week's Red Hat Summit in Boston, Massachusetts. Red Hat is expected to make announcements around JBoss relating to cloud computing and OEM partnerships at the show.
"We would have liked to have shipped six months ago," Muzilla said. "We started to do this refactoring of the architecture, which has taken longer to get out the door than we expected."
The completed JBoss 5.0 will be released to the community for free first and then package into the JBoss' Enterprise Application Platform.
Oracle, meanwhile, is shaping up to be one of JBoss' best customer hunting grounds, according to Muzilla. The reason is uncertainty over the fate of BEA's WebLogic Server thanks to Oracle's radio silence over its plans for overlapping BEA and Oracle products. Muzilla claimed "most" customer wins have been "BEA related" during the last year with a growing number at the expense of Oracle in the past quarter.
Wins are coming in new projects with customers increasing their use of JBoss rather than expanding their number of BEA or Oracle licenses.
"We see a lot of uncertainty in the market because of BEA's acquisition by Oracle," Muzilla said.
"You don't know if the Oracle product is going away, and they will replace it with BEA, and if you are a BEA customer you don't know if the investment you made in AquaLogic will be maintained and you will be moved onto Fusion. Oracle has made no strong product statements in the market," Muzilla said.®
COMMENTS
Douglas
Douglas,
Damned, that is what we can call passion!
As I just mentioned on TSS, I've just posted a blog entry on that very topic:
http://sacha.labourey.com/2008/06/28/jboss-as-50-status/
Onward,
Sacha
CTO JBoss, a division of Red Hat
Re: muzilla
The guy has a way with words, first he announces his arrival on the scene earlier this year by saying that JBoss would capture "50%" of the middleware market, which is patently absurd...note to Muzilla, at least qualify that with 'Java middleware' and .Net is a middleware technology, and to think JBoss will take 50% from Oracle, IBM, and Sun is one thing, but to do it to Microsoft, as well, is crazy-talk...
Then, in this article, he claims that "most" deals are BEA-related, which is also unfortunate, as most of their deals should be Red Hat-related, no one cares if they are picking off departmental deals that WebLogic does not want to price for, because if he thinks that Oracle is not going to be coming full-force in the very near-future is naive...
Finally, i would really like to know what he means by "re-factoring" and "interoperate", because I kind of got the feeling that he doesn't know what that means, or in the very least, i don't know what he means from listening to him, so if his role is to explain the eternally painful delay of JBoss 5, this garbage about re-factoring is not very convincing...
"several quarters" is really disappointing, i know i am a jerk, but I really want JBoss to succeed, and I know engineering a new app server platform is hard-work, but messaging on this could be better, like details on what any of what he says means....
Sacha?...
Websphere Application Server does not support JEE 5
The article incorrectly states that JEE 5 has already been added to IBM's WebSphere Application Server 6.1. In actual fact, WebSphere is in a worse off situation than JBoss. JEE support is scheduled for inclusion in WebSphere 7, which, like JBoss 5, has no release date set yet. WebSphere 6.1 users can get a JEE 5 feature pack, but this is unsupported for production use. JBoss 4.2 however comes with a 99% compliant and supported JEE 5 container out of the box, and JBoss have had their pluggable EJB 3.0 container available to users for a lot longer than WebSphere have had theirs.
The thing that WebSphere 6.1 did include was a Java SE 5.0 JVM, almost 2 years after the release of the Java SE 5.0 spec, and a long time after JBoss shipped versions that were supported on Suns Java SE 5.0 JDK.
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