Red Hat, a provider of open source solutions, announced the JBoss Open Choice application platform strategy, which aims to provide a single environment for deploying a variety of programming models with a common platform. At the heart of the JBoss Open Choice strategy is the JBoss Microcontainer, a new application platform architecture that uniquely isolates core enterprise class platform services from the variety of container and framework choices available today.
The JBoss Open Choice strategy is a response to the rapidly changing landscape of enterprise Java, marked by more variety and more choice of programming and deployment models, says Craig Muzilla, vice president of middleware for Red Hat. "Frankly, because of the success of Java EE in the marketplace, it spawned a variety of alternative approaches to deal with and address some of the limits in the marketplace. These alternatives have really been driven primarily to help ease and simplify application development. You'll see alternative application development frameworks such as Spring and Struts. You'll see alternative component models such as OSGI. You're seeing many new languages spring up, dynamic languages such as Groovy, languages and frameworks such as Ruby and Ruby on Rails." With JBoss Open Choice, Red Hat plans to provide application developers with the ability to choose the framework, language and programming technologies that best fit the application requirements they are trying to achieve without sacrificing reliability, availability, scalability or manageability across their projects. This means JBoss Enterprise Middleware customers will have an opportunity to take advantage of popular programming models such as Spring, Seam, Struts, Google Web Toolkit and Java Enterprise Edition across their products and still enjoy uniformity of management and enterprise-class reliability in the platform.
"Java EE does not address this variety," Muzilla says. "It is too heavy and too complex to address this variety. On the other hand, many the emerging container technologies out there do not have the full set of enterprise services to bet the farm on. They do not have the number of enterprise services that companies have come to expect to deploy large-scale applications in the enterprise."
The strategy is expected to employ a number of new JBoss application platform products, built on a common architecture and designed to address customers' unique application deployment needs without the complex dependencies of traditional Java EE application server products.
Red Hat also announced it has expanded its application server offerings to include workload-specific solutions designed to provide increased flexibility and choice for enterprise customers. Executing on its JBoss Open Choice strategy, the JBoss Enterprise Middleware portfolio now includes solutions for all of the common Java application workloads; from simple web applications, to light and rich Java applications, to Java EE-based applications. Moreover, JBoss platforms support a variety of popular programming models including Spring Framework, Seam and Google Web Toolkit. With this expansion, Red Hat now has one of the most comprehensive Java application server portfolios in the industry.
Red Hat said it plans to provide three workload-based application server runtime solutions, including JBoss Enterprise Application Platform version 5.0 for highly transactional applications; JBoss Enterprise Web Platform for mid-size workloads, such as light and rich Java applications; and Java Application Frameworks to address common Java programming tasks. Frameworks include JBoss Hibernate, JBoss Seam, JBoss Web Framework Kit, and productivity tools. For more details, go here.