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.

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?...

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