Geronimo is now an official ASF project having started life in August 2003 under the Apache Incubator, used by ASF to build communities around new projects.
The application server brings together ASF’s Tomcat and Axis, OpenEJB and ActiveMQ from Codehaus, JOTM and ASM from ObjectWeb, CGLIB and MX4J from SourceForge, and Mortbay’s Jetty.
Geronimo co-founder Dain Sundstorm said in a statement the combination of architectural experience and expertise helped build the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) application server in a short period of time. Official J2EE certification is planned for the third quarter.
ASF’s application server comes at a period when consolidation, instead of expansion, in the J2EE application server market is expected. The open source space, meanwhile, already has an J2EE application server implementation in the form of JBoss.
Geronimo also stands to pose a potential challenge to BEA Systems Inc. BEA is open sourcing its WebLogic Workshop development framework under Project Beehive, which has been submitted to, and last week accepted by ASF.
BEA’s goal is for Tomcat developers to tailor Beehive to ASF’s web server, then – when they hit Tomcat’s security glass ceiling – move across to WebLogic Server.
With ASF pushing its own application server, though, Tomcat users potentially have an alternative platform to migrate to. BEA is likely to attempt to head this off, though, arguing WebLogic provides better supported, value-add features than is possible from the open source, community based application server.
