Red Hat launches community contest to rename JBoss

Sounds too much like it's a Java thing

By Neil McAllister in San Francisco, 4th October 2012

Red Hat says its JBoss Enterprise Application Platform has evolved to embrace far more than just Java, and to reflect this, it has launched a contest to rename the JBoss Application Server (JBossAS) to something more in line with its current vision of multi-language programming.

In a blog post on Monday, Red Hat Senior Director of Middleware Engineering Mark Little explained that JBossAS is a very different project than what it was when it launched as an open source Java EE application server.

"The uses cases it has to satisfy are orders of magnitude more complex and diverse than they were," he wrote. "Put simply, although Java EE is central to what it does and we do as a community, it is no longer the only driving force behind it."

Because the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) has also evolved, today the JBoss platform supports a number of other languages in addition to Java, such as Clojure, Ruby, Scala, and Red Hat's own Ceylon. According to a press release issued on Monday, Red Hat believes JBoss to allow customers to choose any of these languages they want, in what it calls a "polyglot" approach.

What's more, JBoss also supports a number of popular frameworks that are often deployed as alternatives to traditional Java EE, such as the Spring Framework – making the "J" in JBoss seem increasingly outdated.

"We've had lots of discussions here and we believe that the time has come to change the name of our project to better reflect the changes we've seen in its reason for existence so far, but also for what's to come in the future," Little wrote.

Because JBossAS is a community-based open source project, however, naturally the community will be involved in the name change. Red Hat says it will be accepting nominations on its website through October 14, at which point a panel of Red Hat employees will pick the best ones. Those entries will then be presented to the community for voting, with the winner to be announced at the Devoxx conference in Antwerp, Belgium on November 12.

And what does the submitter of the winning name receive? No material compensation has been announced, but the satisfaction of having your entry mentioned in endless future Reg articles, such as this one, must be worth something. ®

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