The company, which made its name with the open source Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) application server, plans to unveil the JBoss Network for customers of its fledgling JBoss Enterprise Server Middleware System (JEMS).
The JBoss Network’s goal is to simplify the task of keeping JEMS installations that run in distributed environments concurrent with latest updates and patches available from JBoss. The network provides a knowledge base and download service.
One problem with JBoss is that because it is essentially free, customers download multiple copies across a wide area but then face the problem of keeping different versions of their software up-to-date and secure.
JEMS is a diverse stack that consists of the applications server, Hibernate Java persistence and query service, jBPM business process management engine, JBoss Cache, portal, integrated development environment, Tomcat technologies, version 1.0 of JBoss’ Aspect Oriented framework and JBoss MicroContainer.
JBoss is a very fast moving code base, JBoss chairman and chief executive Marc Fleury told ComputerWire. We will make a patch available on the network to subscribing customers. The network is available to subscribers of JBoss’ support services, which starts at $10,000.
Fleury called the JBoss Network the center piece to the company’s future services offerings.
Also being launched at the company’s JBoss World, in Atlanta, Georgia, this week, is the JBoss Federation. The Federation, will see JBoss make its project development infrastructure available to individuals and organizations eager to start their own open source middleware projects, but reluctant to go it alone.
The JBoss Federation will provide project management, code checking, wikis, forums and management for open source projects. JBoss believes the Federation will help advance its own mission to build professional open source, with technologies developed through the Federation distributed with JEMS.
Fleury said by opening up JBoss’ infrastructure, JBoss could help provide the processes needed to help shepherd projects through to their conclusion. We don’t want a SourceForge with 8,000 projects not moving. We want enterprise open source, professional open source. This is a generalization of our model. Fleury said.
JBoss is also expected to use its conference to release the latest version of Hibernate. Version 3.0 has been optimized for data-intensive applications, with filtering support for temporal and permissioned data, statistics reporting and monitoring, and support for the Enterprise Java Bean (EJB) 3.0 specification currently working through Sun Microsystems Inc’s Java Community Process (JCP).
