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This is the recording from April, 2008 with lots of detailed information and demos.

We announced six SOA partners - ActiveEndpoints, AmberPoint, Information Builders iWay, SOA Software and Vitria - supporting the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform. These partners also made their announcements as well:

• iWay
• SeeWhy
• SOA Software - announced JBoss Enterprise Middleware as a certified governed platform.

We thank our partners for their great support and look forward to working with them and our customers to expand the market and beneficiaries of SOA!

In 2005, not long after I joined JBoss, we began working to define a strategy to deliver a next generation SOA Platform to the enterprise and mass markets to expand the opportunity for businesses to leverage SOA integration and business process automation. We talked with customers and potential partners throughout the process and in mid-2006 embarked on a strategy that leveraged existing and mature Jboss.org open source projects, customer contributions (including a major existing custom ESB donation that had been running for over 3 years at the time, and the open source community at large. JBoss ESB 4.0 made its debut at the end of 2006 and was followed up by a 2nd generation ESB in August 2007, JBoss ESB 4.2. JBoss ESB 4.2 became the platform for our early adopter program which has about a dozen enterprises spanning multiple industries such as transportation, financial, manufacturing, government and others. The JBoss productization team then turned their attention to delivering an enterprise ready and consumable JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 4.2 announced today, February 14 2008 with planned delivery by the end of the month.

Unlike other open source ESBs which are developer frameworks, the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform is a comprehensive 2nd generation SOA integration and business automation platform. As described with the delivery of JBoss ESB 4.2, the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform brings together several integration technologies to enable enterprises to leverage past investments while building new modern SOA integration solutions. These integration technologies include enterprise application integration (EAI), SOA integration with an ESB, business event management with JBoss ESB's event-driven architecture (EDA). Further, with JBoss jBPM, business processes and workflows may be automated and finally, JBoss Rules is designed to enable complex event processing in the next release of JBoss Rules and the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform.

Having these technologies integrated into a single, enterprise distribution improves productivity of developers and IT overall. The SOA Platform is designed to be very flexible, enabling small, focused ESB deployments that may be federated across the enterprise with out requiring an application server. Leveraging JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform can take advantage of advanced clustering and JEE features to enable a highly scalable integration deployment. It is this combination of past, present and future integration technologies coupled with great deployment flexibility that define the 2nd generation SOA Platform.

We welcome our SOA JBoss Advanced Partners – ActiveEndpoints, AmberPoint, iWay Software, SeeWhy, SOA Software and Vitria. These and future partners add significant value to Red Hat-based SOA deployments on JBoss Enterprise Middleware.

We look forward to working with our customers to help them deploy this new, advanced SOA Platform to help improve their businesses. Our growing community continues to innovate with future projects in complex event processing and SOA Governance starting with JBoss DNA, an open source repository project. We have the new Red Hat SOA resource center available for further information. Stay tuned. It will be fun, and for our customers, productive and profitable!

The term collaboration describes the work people do together to complete a task, build a product or deliver a service. People have been collaborating for tens of thousands of years to solve problems facing them collectively. Today, efficient and effective collaboration are critical to the success of the 21st century enterprise and value chain. Businesses find that they can deliver a superior customer experience, garner customer loyalty, improve financial performance by collaborating across the value chain and even with competitors in some cases.

Over the years, the tools of collaboration have evolved. The earliest electricity-based collaboration tool was the telegraph. Tools improved throughout the 20th century culminating in primitive Internet tools as well as advanced and expensive proprietary portal software and enterprise content management. Only the highest “dollar value” projects could afford these advanced collaboration; others were relegated to the basic Internet tools available – email, web sites, user groups, etc. The 21st century has seen several trends – open source software, more advanced Internet tools such as wikis and blogs, and advanced but simpler to use portal and content management - converge to change this picture significantly.

Against this backdrop, Red Hat and Alfresco have collaborated to build an integrated collaboration solution that capitalizes on these trends and magnifies their benefits. The Red Hat/Alfresco Team Collaboration Solution is designed to bring advanced collaboration and social computing to a larger market ranging from local team collaboration up through value chain collaboration across multiple enterprises. Red Hat and Alfresco do this by bringing together the leading open source portal, the JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform with Alfresco's Web Content Management.

Jboss Enterprise Portal Platform (with default content repository)

JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform provides an open source and standards-based environment for hosting and serving application and information in a portal web interface, publishing and managing content, and customizing users’ experiences. JBoss Portal simplifies access to applications and information by providing a single source of interaction with corporate and internet-based information. Standards supported include the JSR168 portlet standard, Java Content Repository (JSR170) and WSRP.

JBoss' standalone enterprise portal offering provides basic out-of-the-box web and departmental content management support for enabling users to contribute, organize, and maintain content used within a single JBoss portal deployment. Users can upload documents and create simple HTML content fragments, with support for file-level version control and simple browsing using a standard content directory browser.

JBoss Portal is most frequently used as a departmental, functional area, enterprise intranet portal, or value chain extranet portal. JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform is also increasingly being used as an enterprise SOA user interaction platform. Emerging use cases for JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform also include customer and community facing portals.

Alfresco Enterprise Content Management (standalone)

The Alfresco ECM solution is a enterprise platform for managing all business documents, digital assets, and web content in an enterprise. The Alfresco solution supports integrated services for collaboration and records management and provides advanced services for content tagging, federated search, business process management (workflow), security, transformation, lifecycle management, and compliance. Alfresco ECM provides a simple to use, simple to roll-out ECM alternative to traditional products from established vendors such as Documentum, FileNet, Interwoven, and Vignette. While comparable with these traditional vendors in terms of product capabilities, Alfresco's open source business model, out-of-the-box usability, and modern application architecture centered around Spring, Hibernate, Lucene, and JavaServer Faces (JSF) make it a must-evaluate product for any organization looking to launch any new ECM initiative.

Alfresco ECM is seen in many collaboration, document management, image management, records management initiatives. It also may be found as a key product delivering many standalone (non-portal based) web content management initiative, including:

• Intranets and intranet consolidation
• eCommerce
• Corporate www site
• Customer self-service site

Red Hat/Alfresco Team Collaboration Solution

The Red Hat/Alfresco Team Collaboration Solution is a complete solution combining best of breed, standards-compliant J2EE enterprise portal and enterprise content management platforms. This solution is available through the Red Hat Exchange (RHX) which is an online environment for purchasing integrated, enterprise open source solutions.

Pre-integrated and certified on a complete Red Hat Linux / JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform Server stack, this combined offering enables customers to get up-and-running quickly with a major enterprise portal application with a no compromises-architecture to provides rich content delivery and integration services via the JBoss Portal and rich content services via the Alfresco platform. This solution extends Red Hat's JBoss Portal Platform and ECM offerings with out-of-the-box JSR-168 compliant portlets for provisioning content collaboration, document management, and web content management services directly within the portal environment, and a rich, lightweight, JavaScript-based extension framework for readily surfacing any Alfresco's managed content or content services directly into any portal page.

Major Product Capabilities

• All of the capabilities provided in the JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform
• All of the capabilities provided in Alfresco's WCM offering
• My Spaces portlet (pre-built portlet for enterprise document management and collaboration within the context of any portal deployment
• My Documents portlet (pre-built portlet for provisioning any library of documents or digital assets within any portal page)
• My Web Files (pre-built portlet for enabling portal end-users to simply and easily create and manage web content that can be reused outside the portal application itself for purposes of generating marketing collateral, email newsletters, RSS feeds, or other web pages for any non-portal-based website)
• Web Scripts (lightweight, REST- and JavaScript-based development framework for quickly creating new portlets embedding any Alfresco-managed content or content service).

Red Hat and Alfresco see the Team Collaboration Solution being primarily deployed in the following scenarios.

• Employee portals (Sales, HR, Marketing, R&D)
• Value chain extranets (including partners and suppliers)
• Customer portals
• SOA process user interaction and presentation with collaboration requirements

At Red Hat, we are excited to collaborate with Alfresco to bring this leading, open source collaboration solutions to people around the world working on a wide range of tasks, projects and solutions to enable them to simply and affordably enhance their collaboration experience, speed time to market, reduce error and misunderstanding and improve customer and user satisfaction.

Click Red Hat/Alfresco Team Collaboration Solution to get to RHX for more information.

JBoss ESB is a second generation SOA foundation due to its inherent flexibility to be configured to specific use case scenarios as well as its agnostic architecture which is not based on a specific technology such as JMS, JBI or web services like many first generation ESBs. Additionally, as a second generation ESB, JBoss ESB 4.2 is designed to support the following integration and process architectures and models:

• Service-oriented architecture (SOA) by enabling services to by found, communicate and be integrated into applications and business processes
• Event-driven architecture (EDA) with event notification, logging and coordination
• Business process management (BPM) by using the jBPM project for service orchestration internal to the ESB and providing a foundation for business process management extensions such as jBPM or ActiveBPEL for process automation
• Complex event processing (CEP) is not implemented today in JBoss ESB 4.2, however, we are using Drools for content-based routing of messages/events and are setting the foundation for implementing true CEP in the future to enhance event processing

New features of JBoss ESB 4.2 are described here. Also, Burr Sutter answers questions about JBoss ESB 4.2.

We are excited by the progress the open source community has made on JBoss ESB working with partners and early adopters. We look forward to integrating the open source JBoss ESB 4.2 project into a complete SOA and business process automation platform later this Autumn.

To get a head start, download JBoss ESB 4.2 today!

Alfresco recently released some information about its enterprise content management system user base. This study was picked up in several articles including eWeek. It shows a strong Red Hat presence in these Alfresco enterprise deployments and user base.

One of the most interesting tidbits of news was the fact that JBoss Portal had a strong lead in deployments using a Portal with 51% share. Liferay was a distant second at 32% and closed source Portals could only garner 17% share collectively! Looks like another market moving to open source!

I represented Red Hat at the US version of the Accenture conference that Mark Little attended in Europe and blogged about. As Mark described, it was a good conference and basically the same questions and discussion took place. On the vendor panel was IBM, BEA, Red Hat, Microsoft, Sun and Oracle in that seating order. However, there were a couple of notable differences.

For one, while I extolled the importance of vendor-driven standards to solve complex business problems (and reiterated Red Hat's participation in these activities), I also mentioned that I continue to be amazed at how super star developers create a framework such as Hibernate, jBPM, Drools, Spring, or Seam to solve a programming problem in a simple way that ends up being used by large numbers of developers creating a defacto standard. This got a rise out of at least one of the commercial vendors who went on to say something like this after describing their leadership driving standards - "...and these open source communities are proliferating creating way too many frameworks and projects. Like JBoss Seam. Why don't we just fix JSF through the vendor process? Some of these open source projects become defacto standards! I hate to say this, but we need to stifle creativity in the open source community and control these standards so they evolve in a more orderly way...". Wow! I fell out of my chair...and grabbed the mike :-)

After answering the question about open source evolution, I went on to say something like..."While the vendor driven standards process is important, that process gave us J2EE entity beans and the open source community gave us Hibernate. I need say nothing further!".

Oh, and how did I answer "How do I see oen source (OSS) evolving"? Basically, OSS is bringing a great deal of energy and creativity solving developer and business computing problems. OSS is expanding the market by making software more affordable and higher quality. As OSS SOA middleware evolves and becomes more feature rich, it is putting pressure on the commercial vendors in the manner described in the "Innovator's Dilemma" where commercial software continues to become more complex and overrshoots more and more of the market with open source taking a greater share over the next decade.

It was a fun panel :-) .

Not long ago, business rules engines were one of the bastions of pure academic computer science with only a niche role in serving business. As applied artificial intelligence, rules engines are the domain of PhD academics and were used in some advanced simulations, etc... No more. With the rise of some of the pioneering vendors and now a leading open source contender, JBoss Rules, rules engines are being embedded in web applications as well as providing services in a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and to business processes automated with business process management (BPM).

JBoss Rules is the Red Hat product that combines the Drools project with a JBoss subscription. JBoss Rules 3.X was the first version offered by Red Hat's JBoss division starting in early 2006 and was focused on developers using a rules engine embedded in their web or enterprise application. Now, with JBoss Rules 4.0, we see open source rules moving into larger business process roles with its business analyst-friendly business rules management system (technology preview) and more rules tools advancements such as the guided editor. JBoss Rules 4.0 lays the foundation for bringing rules-based solutions into Simple, Open and Affordable SOA deployments and business process workflows.

JBoss Rules 4.0 adds numerous capabilities including:

• Fast – JBoss Rules 4.0 is faster and leaner than its predecessor. As with any technology performance metric, "your mileage will vary" depending on use case, however, our internal benchmarks have shown that key tests have gone from being measured in minutes to seconds.
• Expressive - JBoss Rules 4.0 introduces a dramatically more expressive and powerful declarative business action scripting language. Users will find that it is more concise as well as more readable.
• Tools - Introducing the Guided Rules Editor: Point & click your way to advanced declarative business rules that automatically bind to enterprise data by simply answering basic menu prompts via drop-down lists. No coding (or coders) required.
• Ruleflow - Part of the new Eclipse-based IDE for JBoss Rules 4.0, Ruleflow is a visual modeling technology to declaratively model execution paths of related rules. It also allows for simultaneous flows within a single working memory and essentially organizes rule execution along the requirements governing a typical business process. Example: one rule flow could be acquiring stock ticker information while another flow is performing the logic associated with which stocks to purchase or sell.
• Multi-application support: Improved support for stateful and stateless processing as well as overall thread safety helps make Drools even easier to embed within Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (EE) and service-oriented business applications.
• Hibernate Ready - JBoss Rules 4.0 allows for local reasoning over collections of facts that are pulled directly from Hibernate-driven RDBMS queries. Your existing Hibernate components can be used directly in the rules engine and this reduces the amount of code you need to create substantially.
• Business Rules Management System (Technology Preview) - The new BRMS available with JBoss Rules 4.0 is a web-based, AJAX-enhanced, collaborative rule authoring, versioning and management system. Non-programming IT workers can now interactively author and/or modify rules that are automatically versioned. Administrators now have full life cycle control over which rules are in QA, staging, production, etc.

These additions have been created working with the Drools project user and developer community and shows the power and speed that open source development brings to bear on a high value middleware segment such as rules engines. We are excited about the progress of JBoss Rules and the expanded opportunities it offers for developers and business process professionals around the world!

Check the latest Drools release. Learn more about Red Hat's JBoss Rules product and here which includes the Drools project and the JBoss Subscription. We expect JBoss Rules 4.0 to be finalized by July 20th.

JBoss Portal 2.6 builds on the JBoss open source tradition of collaboration with our users, customers and developer community simplifying user interaction and participation in service-oriented-architecture-enabled business processes. JBoss Portal continues to see expanding deployment in customer service and intranet portal deployments where a simpler, more open and affordable platform is required. The telecommunications, financial services, government and other industries see the benefits of using open source software to add value to their SOA deployments by delivering to human business process participants a personalized experience improving their productivity doing their jobs.

The main themes of JBoss Portal 2.6 community developed enhancements include the following:

• Advanced Personalization – JBoss Portal has had user personalization of individual portlets since the JBoss Portal 2.0. In JBoss Portal 2.6, We've improved the granularity of personalization and ability to further personalize the user experience. Personal user dashboards bring personalized themes, layouts and portlet content increasing the productivity of specific roles and people within a business process or collaboration effort. Further enhancements include user created user interfaces, drag and drop portlets and more granular controlled access at the portlet level.
• Usability Improvements – The open source community including customers provided outstanding input to improve the usability of JBoss Portal which, as with all software, is an ongoing development. The open source difference means that this happens in a transparent manner with JBoss Portal. Improvements include portal and user administration as well as content management. Portlets may be managed overall or for individual instances including default definition. User administration simplifies user creation, provides a list based view and includes user search. Basic content management provided out of the box now includes action-based management within a familiar directory view.
• Content Management System (CMS) Workflow – JBoss jBPM provides content management approval workflow in a configurable process that enables or disables this role-based approval capability.
• Additional Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) Support – WSRP support offers expanded functionality beyond the basic producer and consumer profiles. We've added implicit cloning capability to both the producer and consumer. The advanced WSRP profiles are also supported in JBoss Portal 2.6.
• Identity – Until JBoss 2.6 developers had to write customer JAAS modules to integrate with LDAP. With JBoss 2.6 developers have pre-built integration with LDAP server. Supported servers include Red Hat Directory Server, OpenDS, and OpenLDAP. Portal 2.6 not only provides LDAP integration but an overall simplified architecture for your enterprise directories.
• Google Gadgets - Google Gadgets are mini-applications that work with the Google homepage, Google Desktop, or any page on the web. They can range from simple HTML to complex applications, and can be a calendar, a weather globe, a media player. It is simple to write new custom gadgets. JBoss Portal 2.6 provides a simplified way to drop any of these pre-built gadgets as portlets.

We are excited about the possibilities for customers and users to improve user experiences with JBoss Portal 2.6. In particular, the personalization, usability, identity and WSRP enhancements take JBoss Portal to a new level that was driven by our customers and community for their own use. Check out JBoss Portal and create better user experiences for you and your users today!