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JBoss EAP: Java SE 6 support, Mainframes & more

[ Aaron Darcy ] [Permalink]

The latest Cumulative Patch release for both JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) v4.2 & v4.3 are now available. Cumulative Patches (CPs) are incremental updates that fix all known issues and are typically made available on a quarterly basis to all customers.

Java SE 6 Support
With today's release, we're please to announce official support for Java SE 6 for JBoss Enterprise Application Platform v4.3 using the Sun JDK. Congratulations to the JBoss team for making this happen! We've updated our list of Compatible & Certified Configurations to reflect this.

More Certified Configurations
You'll also notice that we've now extended the number of Certified operating system, chip architectures & JVM combinations from 16 to 29. Since we can't possibly test every combination, we continue to support any configuration that runs on a JVM that we've certified to, no matter the OS/Chip/JVM combination; we call these Compatible Configurations as we rely on the compatibility of the underlying JVM. We try to be transparent and we want you to know what we've officially fully tested against, hence the distinction between 'Certified' & 'Compatible' configurations.

IBM Mainframe Support
Are you running your Java application on a mainframe? Looking for an alternative application server? We've supported JBoss Enterprise Application Platform on mainframes as a Compatible Configuration for some time, and now, based on customer requests, we've officially added mainframes to our list of Certified Configurations with IBM System z running Red Hat Enterprise Linux. If you're looking for reasons to switch, whether you're a mainframe user or not, we've conveniently listed them for you here.

Are these the only configurations we test? Nope. This isn't our complete list, but it does represent the list we run our full battery of quality, integration and performance tests on for every release. If you're wondering what we test, we cover the topic in this whitepaper about the making of JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Also, Andy Miller, one of our JBoss Engineering VPs, provides detail in this blog post from earlier this year.

If you have configurations that you'd like us to add or are interested in learning more about what tests we run, just let us know by sending a note to jbossquestions@redhat.com.

Posted on Mon, 25 Aug 2008 12:26 by Aaron Darcy ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]

JBoss Portal Wins Over Another Developer!

[ Pierre Fricke ] [Permalink]

I couldn't say it better myself. Check out a developer's experience with Liferay V5.1 and JBoss Portal V2.7.

Posted on Fri, 8 Aug 2008 15:02 by Pierre Fricke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]

JBoss Wins InfoWorld Bossie Awards - SOA Platform/ESB and Drools

[ Pierre Fricke ] [Permalink]

Congratulations to the JBoss ESB and Drools teams and communities and the SOA Platform teams overall as well!

Best open source developer tools - Drools - Business Rules Management System.

Best open source plaforms and middleware - JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform - ESB.

Posted on Mon, 4 Aug 2008 17:31 by Pierre Fricke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]

Is JBoss really insecure?

[ Anil Saldhana ] [Permalink]

Answer is No. JBoss is as secure as you want it to be.

Well, according to a recent study by Fortify Software (that has been widely reported everywhere in media), Open Source software poses security risks. The report has considered a set of factors to come to their conclusion.

According to Fortify, JBoss scored very well in security aspects (except that we lacked an email address to privately report security vulnerabilities). That is fixed with basically modifying the html of appropriate pages on the web to display the email address.

In a nutshell, if you have a security vulnerability to report to JBoss, then send an email (privacy guaranteed) to (security AT jboss DOT com) or (security AT jboss DOT org).

Continue to read my thoughts here.

References: http://www.jboss.org/security/

Posted on Fri, 25 Jul 2008 22:56 by Anil Saldhana ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]

SOA World Magazine - Awards - Please Vote!

[ Pierre Fricke ] [Permalink]

Red Hat's JBoss Enterprise Middleware has entries in these categories:
  • Best App Server
  • Best BPM Engine
  • Best OSS SOA Tool
  • Best Portal Plaform
  • Best SOA Platform
Please vote here!

Posted on Thu, 24 Jul 2008 09:27 by Pierre Fricke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]

Daiwa Securities America Improves Performance and Reduces Costs with JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform

[ Pierre Fricke ] [Permalink]

Daiwa Securities is featured as a JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform and JBoss Rules customer in this Red hat press release. They migrated away from an expensive and inflexible proprietary solution for an internal B2E (employee) portal supporting about 120 applications. In addition to featuring JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform,, JBoss Rules is used as an embedded framework (one of the great strengths of JBoss Rules) to provide intelligent alerts to portal applications. Daiwa Securities mentions an immediate $300,000 savings due to the JBoss enterprise open source subscription model.

Posted on Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:12 by Pierre Fricke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]

Early Adopter Swedish Railroad Expands Revenue Opportunities with JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform

[ Pierre Fricke ] [Permalink]

The JBoss SOA early adopter Swedish Railroad has been blogged about here earlier. Matt Asay picks up on this deployment more recently here.

Additionally, I presented Open Source SOA Value and Strategy at Red Hat Summit and SOA World in late June. CIO e-magazine picked up on the Swedish RR example and other current status of open source SOA and future projections here. In particular, we see the convergence of EAI, SOA, BPM, EDA and CEP into a set of integration styles that may be implemented using a common platform - the 2nd generation ESB or SOA Platform. A flexible platform like this is a more cost effective and simpler (reduced to no need for separate architectural bases for EAI, SOA, EDA, BPM, etc...) way to implement an agile IT and enterprise in the future.

Posted on Tue, 8 Jul 2008 16:04 by Pierre Fricke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]

Interview with Bruno Georges - Customer of and Now Employee of Red Hat's JBoss Division

[ Pierre Fricke ] [Permalink]

I met Bruno when he was a customer of JBoss, Inc. back in 2005 at JBossWorld Barcelona (Spain). As a customer, he was a leader in adopting open source for high value SOA projects. As a colleague at Red Hat, I continue to enjoy working with him. Presented below is an interview with his perspective as a user/customer of open source for SOA.

Bruno Georges was Enterprise Architect and Head Of Development for a privately held, major global company in the Oil & Energy industry, of over 10,000 employees with over 140 billion dollars in yearly revenue. Today, as a senior technical manager at JBoss, a Division of Red Hat, Bruno Georges offers some insight into real-life business factors that cause CIO's to choose JBoss.

Q: Bruno, what was the business need for the project. Why change at all?

The majority of our IT budget was spent in maintenance, rather than investing in added value. The primary challenge was raised during a global meeting we held on SOA adoption. Growing complexity resulting from integrations meant budget spent in re-wiring and maintaining multiple source of “business knowledge / business rules” and corporate processes. We were suffering from duplication of these processes, and running the risk of accidentally not updating one of them. It was getting too dangerous: we urgently needed to reduce time to market, decrease risk through exposure, and protect ourselves from wrong financial reports and statements.

Q: What kind of new services were needed?

Integration Services really, ensuring that services were decoupled from each others, with well-defined boundaries. The integration service needed to take responsibility for validation, routing, transformation, and enrichment,etc.. before forwarding this to our core business services, for example, accounting, treasury, trades, etc.

The company's core applications and systems relies partly on Enterprise Java. These applications rely on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) , where coarse grain interfaces to Accounting, Treasury and Commodity Trading systems can be invoked over the network.

The business challenge revolved around migrating these Core Business Services from one Enterprise Java platform to another without any noticeable downtime, loss of performance, assuring data integrity and more importantly, without affecting financial transactions like trading activities, currency hedging, etc. Other business challenges included planning, where it was crucial to run the migration project without disrupting any existing deliverables.

Technical challenges were encountered during the planning of the migration, such as managing the dependencies of the services to migrate, based on whether or not they were using vendor-specific features. The aim of the migration was that it should bring equivalent - if not better - performance, quality and stability.

Q: Was there a particular desire to employ open source technology? If so, why?

We initially identified that we needed to implement our S.O.A. plan at the lowest cost, and with minimum risk. Then the question was raised of whether to use alternatives to commercial products to follow our SOA initiatives with minimum risk and expenditure. It was from identifying these specific requirements that we decided to seriously assess open sources alternatives such as JBoss.

Total Cost of Ownership was a main concern. Moving to a company-wide SOA implementation based on proprietary solutions (i.e WebLogic) would have reached 7 digits, especially considering that we were in the middle of a hardware refresh cycle, moving away from 1-2 CPU machines to 8 core Sun boxes.

Q: How did the project happen in terms of actually getting it underway?

First I arranged a meeting with (JBoss CTO) Sacha Labourey to discuss how we could approach this. We then decided to go ahead with JBoss's 3-Day Assessment offer. From this point we decided to further extend the assessment to come up with a more accurate picture of the resource and planning involved. In the meantime we also assessed local providers and partners like HP and Syseca to identify who could lead the migration and support us afterwards.

We hired JBoss professionals and Red Hat Partner Syseca to support us during the migration. Careful planning and regular reviews were conducted to prevent any issues and conflicts with existing projects or deliverables. Few internal resources were involved to reduce impact on daily activities and existing projects.

The Services forming our SOA have been migrated in 2 steps, the first one being a small and fairly low risk application, so we could give our engineering and operations some production experience and start building a new support and monitoring infrastructure using JBoss ON.

Technical issues were addressed directly with JBoss using the Customer Support Portal. We were really impressed to see JBoss's leading developer and guru Scott Stark getting involved when things got difficult.

Q: Why was JBoss technology considered?

The maturity of the product was important. and of course, the low price! But other things were especially important, too - like the local and global availability of JBoss expertise (Partner: Syseca), Because I was working for such a huge company, Red Hat's global presence was critical.

Q: What solution was finally decided on? Did this result in any savings? Any efficiency advantages?

The vendor selected was JBoss, due to its impressive market share, product quality and support offering, of which there is no equivalent in the open source application server landscape.

JBoss Enterprise Middleware provided a consistent open source platform and choice of tools to build our new infrastructure and applications. Also it offers a comprehensive set of products and a clear roadmap to support our SOA and ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) initiatives.

Q: How long did the project take to deploy?

There were two phases: the first one took three months, and the second and final phase was completed six months later.

Q: What was the most interesting aspect of the project, from a business point of view?

There were many examples, but one thing I especially noticed was time-to-market in an M&A situation. For example, we could now - and did - integrate very quickly with a company which had totally different accounting systems and technical / developer resources. The time-to-market to integrate two totally different platforms (.Net and Java) was dramatically reduced by the use of simple industry standards. What's more, we were able to confirm and validate the in-built functionalities and logic as we progressed. Validation of these milestones was even built into our migration contract, in order to contain, measure and insure against any business risk. This could then be prototyped with minimal effort and in less than one day. Unbelievable! No change was needed in our application/ implementation, or within the infrastructure, and the protection of the existing investment allowed full re-usability of existing infrastructure and resources. To be specific, we did not alter existing IT landscapes, hardware, or business processes, which was great. Another example is where jBPM helped us to reduce the development life-cycle, and allow business analysts to interact with the developers at the “right level”. i.e, the process definition.

Q: How did the JBoss solution improve the business bottom-line?

The great thing about an SOA project is that it brings business stake-holders together to agree on common corporate business policies, processes and rules. Long term business benefits will include removal of license costs on commercial products [through Portal and Integration solutions], and significantly reduce our capital expenditure. In addition, rollout of new business processes became a much simpler exercise, including analysis, implementation and validation.

Q: How was business improved as a result of the new deployment?

The first benefit was financial. We moved away from WebLogic products to JBoss Enterprise Middleware, saving up to six digits yearly. As a result, I was then able to invest more into staff training and development, technology, intellectual IT assets, and other high-value areas.

Executive management can now add more requests for the next Financial Year, and will see that resources are allocated more efficiently. IT department gained credit with the companies business folk. Perception is better, business sponsors become confident that IT is investing in the right direction, and subsequently become more ready to sponsor such changes.

Q: Any advice to other companies considering JBoss Enterprise Middleware?

Go ahead, don't wait. The longer you wait, the harder it will get.

Posted on Tue, 8 Jul 2008 14:58 by Pierre Fricke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]

JBoss5_CR1, SpringDeployer, VFS and new forum

[ Ales Justin ] [Permalink]

Again, just in case you missed it - which would be quite hard, since we did 'invest' into publicity this time. :-) 
JBoss Application Server 5.0.0.CR1 has been released and is available for download from
https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=22866&package_id=16942&release_id=610469

Detailed Release Notes:
https://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=610469&group_id=22866
And the publicity that I've mentioned: 
Dimitris talks about it here:
http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/06/jboss-as5-rc1

And Sacha's blog:
http://sacha.labourey.com/2008/06/28/jboss-as-50-status
It's been great to finally see it come out.

OK, back to the usual - my Spring deployer. ;-)
With a few changes in the deployers and complete classloading re-wamp, Spring deployer also needed a minor update.
Here is the latest build:
- SpringDeployer 3.1 at SourceForge

Alongside Microcontainer project a new VFS project was developed. VFS stands for Virtual File System, a simple read-only framework abstracting the way we look at the 'file' system.
The two key points there are that we don't limit ourselves with the underlying 'file' system, meaning the file can be basically anything that has specific 'file' semantics, ranging of course from plain/real file system to in-memory byte 'file' representation (the two that we currently implement), or perhaps even some LDAP or relational database. The other key point is the way you traverse over path. We've seen a lot of duplicate code all over the place where the code was asking the resources whether they are plain files/directories or archives, asking the URL connection if it's plain file or jar connection, ... With VFS you just put in a path or URL, and the framework abstracts all the details for you, hiding them behind simple VirtualFile API.
But of course something like that comes with a cost, expecting other written frameworks not to understand VFS protocol, since they mostly limit itself to what default JDK provides (a horrible URL handling code for Windows ;-).
We first encountered this with Facelets while deploying Seam apps. So here is the fix:
  • https://facelets.dev.java.net/files/documents/3448/99102/facelets-1.1.15.B1.zip
  • https://facelets.dev.java.net/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=315
And with connection to SpringDeployer and Spring's ability to do scanning for components, this issue poped-up:
- Spring deployer and component scanning on JBoss forum
The fix is already part of SpringDeployer 3.1, or you can use just the VFS based resource pattern resolver from here:
- VFS and ResourcePatternResolver

Aha, not to forget, JBoss5 has a whole new forum dedicated just to the issues with the new CR1 (and future JBoss5) release.
- JBoss5 forum

OK, that's it from me.
Probably till next JBoss5 release. ;-)

Posted on Sat, 5 Jul 2008 08:02 by Ales Justin ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]

RESTEasy MOM: An exercise in JAX-RS RESTful WS design

[ Bill Burke ] [Permalink]

A few months ago after my first release of RESTEasy JAX-RS, I realized that I had made a cardinal mistake with our JAX-RS implementation. I had yet to build any real application with it. I had yet to test drive it. In fact, I had actually never written a RESTful application period. So, with that in mind, I decided to build something so I could get a feel how good JAX-RS and REST actually was. But what to build? I thought of redoing Pet Store with AJAX and RESTEasy as the backend, but then I'd actually have to learn AJAX or some AJAX framework. Then I thought, I'm a middleware developer, why not make some piece of middleware RESTful? Thus, RESTEasy MOM was born. This blog entry is about both an exercise in RESTful Web Service design as well as its Java counterpart, JAX-RS.

Click here for rest of article...

Posted on Thu, 19 Jun 2008 11:42 by Bill Burke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]

Making the web service experience easier

[ Alessio Soldano ] [Permalink]

Starting from JBossWS-2.0.3.GA the JBossWS team is putting some efforts in the web service productivity area. What does this mean?
We've been thinking about the real life problems ws users have to cope with day by day and tried to make the whole web service experience easier.
This process have been driven by a reorganization of the JBossWS documentation; new advanced samples have been released while tutorials and best practices about real world web service issues have been written.
The main achievements these productivity efforts led to include:
  • An Ant-based Web Service Project Generator (the idea is almost the same of SeamGen): this can be used to automatically create a simple project along with an Ant build file to compile and deploy it; a basic Eclipse configuration is also generated for the new project. The most commonly required libraries are referenced from the user specified JBoss application server home, so that the user simply needs to code its web service provider / consumer application.
  • A JBossWS Testsuite Eclipse project: the JBossWS distribution already comes with a testsuite whose run is a good starting point for a web service training. Even if the testsuite can be run using the provided Ant scripts, beginners might feel more comfortable running the JUnit tests and looking at their results directly in the IDE. For this reason a testsuite project can be generated and imported in Eclipse.
  • A simple Record Management system providing web service administrators a means of performing custom analysis of their webservice traffic as well as exporting communication logs. Pre-installed record processors collect information about the exchanged SOAP messages; this can be useful for accountability reasons ("which customers are actually hitting service A?") as well as for statistics, record filtering, etc. ("what are the last 3 request-response exchanges with customer C?"). The record management is available through the JMX console or by the JBossWS SPI; as a matter of fact users might want to code their own record processors and plug them into JBossWS to perform custom processing of the collected records (why not storing them for off-line statistics? ;-) )
Finally, since starting from JBossWS 3.0 integration layers are provided to support both the Metro and CXF web service stacks, the afore mentioned achievements are cross-stack features and thus can be used in JBossWS-Native, JBossWS-Metro and JBossWS-CXF.

Posted on Tue, 17 Jun 2008 06:09 by Alessio Soldano ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]

Resteasy JAX-RS 1.0 Beta 5 Released!

[ Bill Burke ] [Permalink]

Customer bug fixes and new features in this release. We've implemented some JSON support after some users requested this feature. Using the Jettison Framework, you can use JAXB annotated classes and marshal them to and from JSON. A pretty cool framework and easily integrated into RESTEasy JAX-RS. Click here for more information on this release...

Posted on Wed, 11 Jun 2008 21:13 by Bill Burke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]

REST and JAX-RS talk, Thursday, June 12th NEJUG, Burlington, MA

[ Bill Burke ] [Permalink]

Bill Burke will be speaking this Thursday, June 12th at the Boston area JUG (NEJUG) at the Sun campus in Burlington at 6:00 pm. The talk will be on on REST and how the new JAX-RS specification makes it easier for you to write RESTFul Web Services in Java. Please stop by, at least to say hi. Hecklers welcome too!

Posted on Mon, 9 Jun 2008 10:43 by Bill Burke ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]

Modular, Pfft

[ Rich Sharples ] [Permalink]

So now every vendor is claiming a modular architecture for their enterprise Java runtime. This is progress and maybe OSGi really will become the standard framework for enabling modular architectures. Unfortunately people needed this capability 5 years ago.

Read more...

Posted on Thu, 5 Jun 2008 16:11 by Rich Sharples ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]

Tech Chat: EAP, JBDS, & JBoss ON w/ David Ward

[ Aaron Darcy ] [Permalink]

Dzone just posted a great interview with one of our JBoss Solutions Architects. David does a great job covering the core features of:

  • JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP): our certified & supported application server that integrates JBoss Application Server with JBoss Hibernate, JBoss Seam and numerous other JBoss.org projects.

  • JBoss Developer Studio (JBDS): our IDE that integrates Eclipse, tooling, and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform to help developers easily build rich Web 2.0 applications.

  • JBoss Operations Networks (ON): our management platform that helps administer, monitor, configure and tune applications.


    • The video & transcript are here. Enjoy!

    Posted on Tue, 3 Jun 2008 16:35 by Aaron Darcy ( day(s) old) Trackbacks [0]

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