Red Hat, a provider of open source solutions, announced availability of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5.0, which the vendor says will be integral to Red Hat's cloud foundation.
Red Hat's middleware portfolio is designed to help customers take advantage of cloud computing, the vendor states. As a core component of Red Hat's cloud computing foundation, customers should be able to combine JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and Red Hat Enterprise Linux with integrated virtualization technologies that provide customers with the industry's only fully virtualized, standards-based enterprise open source cloud computing service platform, supporting both on-premise and off-premise cloud deployments.
Aaron Darcy, director of JBoss Product Line Management for Red Hat, tells 5 Minute Briefing he sees a lot of operations with Java EE environments now looking at integrating cloud approaches. "Due to the economy, we're seeing a lot of customers evaluating clouds and trying to figure out where cloud computing could play a role in their environment," he relates.
JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5.0 is designed to provide a consistent foundation to support the wide variety of Java programming and component models, including Plain Old Java Objects, Java EE, Spring Framework, OSGi, Google Web Toolkit and a variety of Rich Internet Application frameworks and dynamic languages. Additionally, the platform spans the growing number of operating models, from traditional on-premise lightweight Java applications, to newer internal and external cloud-based deployments. Customers are expected to benefit from easier application development and deployment, developer choice in programming models, protection against programming model changes and an easier transition to newer application deployment models.
Red Hat also says that JBoss Enterprise Application Platform is the first commercially available Java EE application server available in Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). This new release will also be made available on Amazon EC2, as well as other environments that achieve Red Hat's Premier Cloud Provider Certification. Darcy sees possibilities for both "private" clouds, as well as for integrating with external cloud resources. "Our customers want to be able to do both - taking the concepts of cloud computing and service platforms and incorporating them into their own internal environments, as well as utilizing public clouds for less critical or peak workloads where it makes sense," he says. "This concept of dual operating environments is one of the key reasons why they want to leverage solutions that span across both traditional and cloud environments. Just because they've selected a new deployment method-the cloud-doesn't mean they have to change the way they've been managing their software. They want the freedom to choose between both operating environments, and this is exactly what Red Hat provides."
Darcy adds that "customers we talk to are concerned with typical enterprise features: stability, security, data privacy and performance. In all cases, they're extremely sensitive toward avoiding vendor lock-in. Because of this, they're primarily interested in solutions that can seamlessly transition between their traditional on-premise deployments and the cloud."
JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5.0 is designed to leverage a second-generation service-based Microcontainer architecture to provide a consistent and modular series of enterprise deployment features for clustering, caching, transactions, Web services, security and more, regardless of the selected programming model or deployment style. This unique JBoss Microcontainer architecture makes it possible for JBoss solutions to support many different programming models. It also makes it possible to separate enterprise services to be more configurable, which enables easier development and deployment. The new release also features an advanced administrative console that makes configuring traditional and cloud-based application grids simpler and easier.
JBoss Enterprise Application Platform supports the Java EE 5 standard, as well as providing support for several upcoming Java EE 6 standards, including the Java EE Web Profile concept, the vendor says. Developer tooling is available with JBoss Developer Studio, an Eclipse-based integrated development environment that provides a comprehensive set of tools developers need to quickly build rich, highly interactive applications and services using technologies such as Seam, Java EE, Spring, Hibernate, AJAX, and RichFaces. For more information, go here.