Since we announced the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 Early Adopter Program we've been providing registered users with regular updates on the status of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6. Today, we're excited to share with everyone – customers, partners, members of our developer community – news about our biggest update yet: the formal announcement of the downloadable public beta version of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

The latest generation of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform enables greater agility and responsiveness than ever before. JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 is higher performing and easier to manage. This cloud-ready solution is based upon JBoss Application Server 7, one of the first Java EE servers available in a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and is designed to help organizations deploy to the cloud at their own pace.

However, it's not just about the datacenter. For developers, we are also delivering the beta of JBoss Developer Studio 5. This new solution offers a comprehensive toolset that makes it easier to create a wide range of mission-critical applications, from datacenter to mobile devices, all while speeding time-to-market.

JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 offers several new, significant highlights, including:

• A cloud-ready architecture. JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 was created with the cloud in mind. As such, it's been designed and architected for use everywhere, including in on-premise and public clouds. This approach offers enterprises the ability to ease into the cloud without fear that the applications they develop and deploy today will be irrelevant tomorrow.

   

• Flexible manageability. The solution contains a robust set of new management capabilities that allow organizations to more easily manage their applications, automate processes, and integrate their own management tools, including private clouds.

• Enhanced usability. JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 provides a number of significant usability upgrades. These include faster start-up and boot times and a smarter core that starts and stops services as required without the need to manually load and manage classes.

   

• A continued focus on developer productivity. JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 supports the full Java EE 6 specification, providing an easier, modernized approach to developing enterprise applications. Additionally, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 continues to build upon the JBoss Open Choice strategy, featuring support for other popular frameworks such as Spring, Struts, and Google Web Toolkit (GWT). It also offers increased integration with other development tooling, including Maven and Hudson and JBoss Community projects such as Arquillian and Hibernate.

   

We encourage everyone to download the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 and JBoss Developer Studio 5 betas and look forward to your feedback. We also encourage you to sign up for updates on developments on both of these solutions. And be on the lookout for the final versions coming later this spring.