JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

One of the most popular open source app servers, JBoss, is now being offered

through a subscription service as a stable release from Red Hat. This platform

is meant for organizations seeking enterprise-class, open standards solution to

build and host services in a Service Oriented Architecture. Here Red Hat, with

its investments in JBoss.org open source middleware community, is offering

components from JBoss stable for application presentation, service hosting and

data persistence in a single middleware solution at an affordable price.

JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) integrates Java EE and Web 2.0

technologies to provide a solution for enterprise Java applications. The

Application Platform includes a stable release of JBoss Application Server for

deploying, hosting and clustering of enterprise's Java applications and web

services. The platform also includes JBoss Hibernate for object/relational

mapping (ORM) and data persistence along with JBoss Seam, a framework for

building Web 2.0 applications. In all, this entire platform offers a suite of

technologies that remove complexity and simplify development of Java

applications, and also improve a developer's productivity. JBoss EAP is

interoperable with most operating systems like Windows or Linux that are capable

of running JVM. It is also compatible with any JDBC compliant database like IBM

DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL etc.

Components & features



The JBoss EAP is a Java EE application and service hosting platform that

extends the Java standard and forms the foundation for Java EE 5. The EAP's

integrated JBoss Application Server 4.2 (reviewed February'08) offers Apache

Tomcat web server as a container for Servlets, JSPs and HTML pages. It also

offers capabilities of caching, messaging, clustering, transactions, and an

integrated web services stack that makes web services development simpler. The

JBoss App Server provides full support for J2EE 1.4 services and also includes

extended support for Java EE 5. Developers get the ability to work with

annotations, JSF 1.2, Java Persistence API 1.0 and EJB 3.0 for their

applications.

The integration of Hibernate with EAP provides mapping from Java classes to

database tables and from Java data types to SQL data types and also provides

data querying and retrieval facility. This relieves the developer from manual

data persistence programming tasks. JBoss Seam is a framework that supports

unification of both app component model through EJB 3.0 and view component model

through JSF 1.2, AJAX and Portlets.

Red Hat provides two subscription models for JBoss EAP service support. The

Standard support entitles the user to avail support at daytime on weekdays only

through web, phone or emails for one year. Premium support, on the other hand,

offers round-the-clock support for a year. Both subscriptions are sold as four

CPU units. Apart from support, subscription includes security fixes, updates and

access to newer versions released within subscription validity. The installation

process is a cake-walk. You only need to have JDK 1.4 or higher (JDK 5 is

required when applications are based on EJB 3.0). Once the JBoss EAP is

installed, the start menu programs are created to start and stop the server.

Though the default JVM bind port is 8080 for application deployment, you can

change the port settings from sever.xml file. The web console is easy to

understand and when we deployed WAR (web archive) file on the server, the

Application Server hot-deployed the archive, and the application was up and

running. The installation of EAP also includes two demo apps that can be used

for further reference or as a starting point for other applications.

Bottomline: A useful open source middleware that

will allow enterprises to shift their budget from middleware deployment costs

toward service and support.