News

Java Component Repository Adds JBoss Community Projects

• By John K. Waters
• September 14, 2011

Another family of Java components will soon be available from the open source Maven Central Repository. Sonatype, the chief commercial supporter of Maven and administrator of the repository, has added Red Hat's JBoss Community project artifacts to the growing list of components assembled there.

Components from a number of JBoss Community projects are already available from the repository, including JGroups, HornetQ, Javaassist, Netty, Hibernate, RestEasy, jBPM and Drools. Mark Little, senior director of engineering middleware at Red Hat, says more will be added in the coming months.

The advantage of this move for developers, Little said, is that they can now easily locate and consume JBoss Community software components from a single, standard location. His company standardized on Maven to provide a uniform build system for developing JBoss Community projects, he said. By providing "transparent, streamlined access" to project artifacts, the repository speeds up the development process for the JBoss Community.

Sponsored and licensed by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), Maven is an open-source framework and repository for building and managing Java-based projects. It started as an effort to simplify the build processes in the Jakarta Turbine project (a servlet-based framework that helps Java developers quickly build Web applications). Based on the concept of a project object model (POM), Maven can manage a project's build, reporting and documentation from a central piece of information. The project's stated goal today is to allow developers to comprehend the complete state of a development project in the shortest period of time.

Created in 2001, the Central Repository is accessed by developers nearly four billion times per year, Sonatype reports, making it one of the most visited services on the Web. Such projects as NetBeans, Oracle JDeveloper, Eclipse, Apache Maven, Ant, Gradle and Nexus use the repository to access Java components.

The JBoss Community announcement comes on the heels of news that Oracle is working with Sonatype to bring Java.net project artifacts to the Central Repository. Sonatype provided both Oracle and JBoss with a standard repository infrastructure based on the company's commercial repository manager, Sonatype Pro for Nexus.

"The Central Repository has become the primary exchange for open source components," said Jason van Zyl, CTO and founder of Sonatype in a statement. "With a standard repository infrastructure in place, JBoss Community users can get the components they need more easily, and JBoss Community developers can reduce the risk and errors associated with disparate libraries."