News

Middleware moves into open source

• By Michael Alexander
• September 21, 2004

JBoss Application Server 4.0, middleware recently certified for J2EE, is ready for enterprise production deployment, according to JBoss. It's available now under the Lesser General Public License open-source license.

JBoss AS has been downloaded more than 5 million times, and ranks first with Java developers and independent software vendors, JBoss says. In a study by BZ Research, the use of JBoss AS almost doubled from 13.9% in 2002 to 26.9% in 2003, giving it the highest rate of market-share growth among all app servers.

'Our entire business has relied on JBoss AS for the past year and we have been extremely satisfied with the performance and reliability' says Jamie Cash, director of technical architecture at NLG, one of the nation's largest online and offline leisure travel companies. 'The modularity of the architecture enabled us to pick and choose the services we needed, and to tighten integration with the applications running on top.'

JBoss AS 4.0 enables middleware providers to deliver greatly simplified programming models to developers without sacrificing service capabilities, including object persistence, caching, acidity, remoteness, transactions and security, JBoss says. Some key features and benefits include:

• Scalability. JBoss offers full clustering of any Java object, including EJB, JMS, HTTP and Plain Old Java Objects (POJOs). 
  
  
• Performance. Based on their own internal benchmark tests, JBoss users have found that JBoss offers improved performance and superior server utilization over other leading J2EE application servers.
   
• Customizable footprint. A modular and elegant architecture built on a microkernel-based design leverages JMX extensions. The result is a lightweight component model that allows users to tailor the footprint to their specific needs. 
  
  
• Services-oriented architecture. Services can be easily added or removed based on the specific needs of the user. All services are neatly packaged and fully hot-deployable. Users can also create and add their own services easily. 
  
  
• Enterprise-class services for any Java object. An aspect-oriented framework allows users to deliver EJB-like functionality such as persistence and distributed transactional caching to any POJO.

JBoss AS 4.0 is immediately available at http://www.jboss.com/downloads/index and is free to download and use regardless of the size of the production deployment. The general-user license also allows ISVs to embed and distribute JBoss AS free.