JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 4.2

The Background

This week is important for the JBoss division. We’ve released our first Enterprise Platform. A few months back, we blogged about how we had decided to split our release work into two “branches”: the JBoss.org releases (i.e. JBoss as you always knew it) and the Enterprise releases (the only ones we will sell support for).

As you can imagine, such a new release and productization scheme required quite a few changes in engineering. While we have been able to leverage a lot of what Red Hat has been building in the last few years to put in place the Red Hat Enterprise Linux/Fedora model, there was no ready-to-consume pattern we could apply to make it happen. For example, JBoss software is by definition OS-agnostic. What seems like a simple requirement à priori has immediate consequences on what tools we were able to reuse as-is (or not) from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux team. We are going to drive a post-mortem of this first Enterprise Platform in the near future so we can improve our processes and tools for the next platforms to be released this year (including the EAP 5.0 and SOA 4.2 platforms – more on this below).

EAP 4.2

EAP 4.2 features many new components including JBoss 4.2.0, Tomcat 6, Hibernate 3.2.4SP1, Seam 1.2.0 as well as newcomers such as our new Web Services stack, a preview of EJB3 and the new transaction monitor acquired from Arjuna.

When defining what would make it into EAP 4.2 we had two main goals in mind:

1. We wanted to offer a stabilized EE1.4-based environment for which we could commit to provide support for the next five years (with backward compatible fixes), and
2. We wanted to provide a stepping stone towards EE5/EAP 5.0 (to be released later this year) by making sure we bundle in EAP4.2 as many EE5-based modules that had already been finalized.

EAP 4.2 has been tested on many different OSes (HP-UX, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Solaris, Windows), JVMs (BEA, HP, SUN) and DBs (MS SQL, MySQL, Oracle, Postgres SQL) and will be available in seven languages. From a dependency standpoint, EAP 4.2 will be used as the foundation for the future SOA platform 4.2 and JBoss Communication Platform.

We told you, big engineering changes.

Next…

Now that EAP 4.2 is out, we can fully focus our efforts on EAP 5.0, which will feature JBoss AS 5.0.

Practically, most of the work that remains to be done for JBoss AS 5.0 has not much to do with the implementation of the EE5 services themselves (we are in the high ninety percent TCK completion with not too much time spent on it), but mostly around the new JBoss Microcontainer and some long-due refactoring we wanted to do (invokers, interceptors, metadata, etc.). With its new core (and its long awaited profile service), a new administration console, JBoss Messaging as its default broker, JBoss AS 5.0 will set a new standard in the JBoss AS releases. So stay tuned.

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