Red Hat-owned JBoss is releasing two technologies aimed at broadening the open source application server and middleware market offerings, to serve as a more complete stack of open source software at the heart of a services oriented architecture (SOA).
Red Hat touted capabilities and features in both its new JBoss Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and its Java Enterprise Edition (EE) 5.0 server, indicating the software rounds out a complete SOA package for customers.
The JBoss technology, announced this week at the JBoss World conference in Berlin, represents Red Hat’s open source answer to other SOA solutions from proprietary vendors such as BEA and Oracle, which last month announced its intention to provide support for Red Hat’s Linux at a lower price.
Product of Integration
Red Hat said JBoss ESB — a technology that intermediates interactions between applications, services, other business components and middleware — rounds out an open source package for SOA built with the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite (JEMS).
With the Java EE 5.0 application server, Red Hat said users would get more functionality, including clustering, messaging, Web services and increased interoperability.
“As an integrated company, Red Hat and JBoss are focused on delivering the leading open source platform for next-generation computing that drives down infrastructure costs for our customers without compromising on value and choice,” said Pierre Fricke, JBoss Director of Product Management.
The Race Is On
By piecing together an open source story for SOA, which can now be deployed in JBoss components or in a more complete package, Red Hat is giving the market a major choice between open source and other vendors, including IBM, BEA and Oracle, Interarbor Solutions Principal Analyst Dana Gardner told LinuxInsider.
“The time is now for the marketplace to vote,” he said.
It will be interesting to see what kind of trend evolves around the choice, which in the past has consisted of customers starting out with or picking smaller parts of infrastructure for open source, then moving to commercial solutions with increased size and needs, Gardner added.
Beyond the App Server
Although application servers have not been viewed as frameworks in the past, app server technology is branching out into a number of different areas, Illuminata Senior Analyst Wayne Kernochan told LinuxInsider.
The new JBoss technology would be beneficial to JBoss users, but it is unclear whether the SOA offerings would attract new customers, he noted.
Calling Red Hat’s JBoss moves an effort to position the Linux company against rival BEA, Kernochan indicated the announcements show a proliferation of Java development standards and products that could hamper progress.
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