News

JBoss EAP 7 Beta Now Available

• By John K. Waters
• January 26, 2016

Red Hat Inc. has has announced the availability of the first beta build of the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBoss EAP). Version 7 of the company's Java EE-based middleware platform addresses new enterprise interest in containers and microservices, and integrates Red Hat's WildFly Application Server 10.

JBoss EAP 7 supports Java SE 8, but it's also a certified Java EE 7 app server. Red Hat, a long-time Java community leader, took on the maintenance of the Java 7 stream last year through the OpenJDK 7 project after Oracle issued its last public security update. JBoss EAP 7 provides support for four new Java EE 7 specifications and "a focus on developer productivity and Web-scale applications." It also includes such performance and productivity enhancements as batch tooling, which makes it possible for developers to more easily monitor, create, manage and configure batch jobs.

In its announcement of the JBoss EAP 7 beta, Red Hat emphasizes support for "the new world" of containers and microservices. The company aims with this release to provide "a bridge to give customers what they need to build and deploy applications of the future and refresh traditional Java EE environments." The platform has been optimized for container and cloud deployments, and features a low-memory footprint for higher density deployments -- direct support for the needs of Java developers working in resource-conscious virtualized cloud environments, such as OpenShift.

JBoss EAP7 will also come with a newly designed Undertow system, which relies on the latest non-blocking I/O features of Java. This update changes the Web server and servlet Undertow supports the latest Web standards such as HTTP/2, HTTP Upgrade and WebSockets.

The beta announcement stresses Red Hat's supported upgrade process. "We've focused on improved protocol version support and tooling, with a focus on interoperability with existing JBoss EAP 5 and 6 environments," the company said. The new messaging subsystem, for example, is based on the unified messaging technology for Red Hat products, Apache ActiveMQ Artemis. Active MQ Artemis is designed to allow customers to pass messages between JBoss EAP 6 and JBoss EAP 7, which is meant to preserve the performance, scalability and reliability of HornetQ from JBoss EAP 6.

JBoss EAP 7 also includes an updated management console UI, including easier navigation and much better support for large-scale domain configurations.

The Red Hat JBoss EAP 7 beta is available for download now from the JBoss developer page.