JBoss Application Server 4.2.2

Last October, JBoss.org came out with the latest stable release of JBoss
Application Server (JBoss AS) version 4.2.2. The key components of the Java
Platform Enterprise Edition (EE) 5.0 are integrated onto the new JBoss's
MicroKernel architecture. It's a J2EE-certified platform for developing and
deploying Java applications, Web applications, and Web portals.

The latest release provides all J2EE 1.4 features and extended enterprise
services such as clustering, caching and persistence. To check how well it works
and what new does it offer, we downloaded it from www.JBoss.org, installed and
implemented it.

Installation

Installation was quite simple; we just had to extract its zip file to a
directory, and we could start the server from there. Since this AS requires
JDK5; we installed it on a Vista machine running JDK6. As per JBoss's
documentation, you can run the server on JDK6, but full support for JDK6 will be
available only with the release of JBoss 5. We implemented it and tried to
deploy a WAR (Web archive) file, which was using Java DB by placing it on the
deployment directory while the server was still running.

The application server was able to hot-deploy the WAR file. The whole process
of installing and deploying a test application took less than 10 minutes.

There are three settings defined for deploying this application server:
minimal, default and all. With 'minimal' settings, one could configure what all
services are required, and thus, can reduce the server's start-up time .

The Web console lets you monitor and modify the configuration parameters through the use of MBeans

Features

The JBoss AS includes the latest Tomcat 6.0 Web server which provides the
necessary support required for developing JSP 2.1 and Servlets 2.5
specification-based applications.

The integrated 'Hypersonic database engine' provides database support as
well. Similar to its previous versions, support for Java Message Service (JMS),
JavaMail, and Java Transaction API (JTA) are still primary features. JBoss uses
JDK 5 for running, meaning that users get the liberty to work with Annotations
as well as EJB3.

JBoss AS provides full support for Java-based Web service applications, which
are now being incorporated in most business processes. Clustering and
distributed application deployment is the other feature. The latter allows
creation of an applications farm on a single server.

The Web console of this AS is not as intuitive as that of WebLogic, but it
provides all features for controlling and monitoring the server. You can monitor
and configure the parameters of resource attributes by use of MBeans (managed
beans).

Bottom Line: An enterprise class application
server offering complete support for JEE apps, and will offer application
portability with its next-awaited release, JBoss 5.