News

Red Hat Releases JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 7.2

• By John K. Waters
• January 23, 2019

Red Hat today announced the general availability of the 7.2 release of its JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP). This release comes with greater compliance with Java Enterprise Edition (EE) 8, JDK 11, Java SE 11 and additional support for Microsoft Windows and enterprise Java microservices.

The JBoss EAP is an open source Java EE 8-compliant application server used to deploy and manage enterprise Java apps in bare-metal, virtualized and containerized environments, as well as on-premises, private, public and hybrid clouds. Version 7.2 is Java EE 8 certified, which means it comes with new functionality and updates to existing capabilities.

In its announcement, Red Hat underscored its continuing our commitment to Java EE 8 and Jakarta EE; the latter technology is now under the stewardship of the Eclipse Foundation, "the new home for cloud-native Java," the company said.

"As a Java EE-certified platform, JBoss EAP 7.2 is designed for organizations whose enterprise Java application workloads demand reliability, availability, scalability, performance, transactionality, and strong security capabilities," the company said, "and that also may have compliance requirements that need to be juggled alongside a developer-friendly, more highly productive technology that offers flexible deployment."

Java EE 8 certification of this release introduces new capabilities designed to improve portability and security of applications and the manipulation of JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) documents. It also includes updates designed to increase the reusability of functionality across Java EE and Java SE, resulting, the company said, in a "more coherent set of capabilities that are designed to improve the development experience."

This release also comes with enhancements related to the support of HTTP/2, as well as support for OpenJDK 11, Oracle JDK 11, Java SE 11 and long-term support releases of OpenJDK.

Red Hat is providing support for OpenJDK 8 until 2023 and OpenJDK 11 until 2024. The JBoss EAP 7.2 release also includes Technology Preview support for Eclipse MicroProfile Config, REST Client, OpenTracing and Health, four of the 12 libraries that are currently part of the community-driven open source project for enterprise Java microservices.

In addition, this release is certified for Red Hat Developer Studio 12, supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta and adds Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-2 security enhancements, which comply with U.S. federal security standards.

There's also a server management, console and CLI improvements in this release, which can help apply and manage changes faster and shorten the time spent on maintenance tasks. There's a new ability to build once and deploy anywhere, within a single subscription, new Maven bill-of-materials (BOMs) for JBoss EAP and Java EE 8, tighter integration with Red Hat OpenShift for clustered applications, and support for IBM Db2 e11.1, IBM MQ 9 and PostgreSQL 10.1

JBoss EAP 7.2 is a key component of Red Hat Application Runtimes, which also includes OpenJDK, Red Hat OpenShift Application Runtimes, ActiveMQ, and Red Hat JBoss Data Grid, integrated and optimized for Red Hat OpenShift. The end result is a "coherent hybrid cloud application platform" on which customers can optimize their existing Java applications, while "innovating with enterprise Java and non-Java microservices, DevOps, CI/CD, and advanced deployment techniques."

JBoss EAP is available for download by members of the Red Hat Developers community. Customers can get the latest updates from the Red Hat Customer Portal.

This is the first Red Hat product release since IBM announced in October plans to acquire the company. Reaction to the acquisition has been largely positive. "IBM and Red Hat are the two largest contributors to the Java platform, other than Oracle," Gartner analyst Anne Thomas told ADTmag in an earlier interview, "so instead of two organizations with potentially conflicting agendas, there will be one. This ensures better synergy, but reduces competition. And I anticipate that IBM will reduce the total number of people dedicated to supporting the Java community."