Red Hat JBoss 2015 – What a Year!

I've been part of the Middleware (aka JBoss) team at Red Hat for almost 8 years now and I can say pretty unequivocally that 2015 was a huge year. Huge. Huge in terms of growth (the team, revenue, customers); huge in terms of the number of new initiatives and markets we're taking on and huge in terms of product releases. I don't plan to enumerate all the year's achievements here - there are way too many, but I did want to cover a few of the more recent announcements.

xPaaS

The first major milestone we hit with our xPaaS initiative - xPaaS being short-hand for taking our existing middleware products and capabilities and making them first class citizens of the cloud - specifically taking them to cloud environments via OpenShift (Red Hat's PaaS). This is something we started back in 2012 with JBoss EAP and JBoss EWS on OpenShift 1.0 . In the meantime, OpenShift has been through a significant rearchitecture with 3.0 - adopting de-facto industry standard container technologies like Docker and Kubernetes. With the recent roll-out of OpenShift 3.1 - we've added support for additional middleware services :

• Integration Services - supported Red Hat Fuse - connects applications to the data sources, systems and APIs they need.
• Real-time Decision Services - supported by JBoss BRMS for authoring, managing and executing sophisticated business rules.
• In Memory Data Grid Service - supported by JBoss Data Grid - our market-leading,  distributed, in-memory key-value store that can boost your application performance and scalability by orders of magnitude.

That's in addition to the existing Application, Web and Messaging Middleware Services already available on OpenShift. During our xPaaS journey - One of the major design goals for us has always been that no matter where you run JBoss - it's the same - doesn't matter if you're running in a virtualized environment, directly on a public IaaS like EC2 or in our OPenShift PaaS - it's still JBoss and behaves just the same. Developing apps. for EAP or Fuse on EC2 is no different to developing them for bare-metal or OpenShift. Read more about xPaaS here.

Mobile

Red Hat Mobile Application Platform (RHMAP) 3.6 - Red Hat's MBaaS (Mobile back-end as a Service) was also released this week - while not a major feature release - this does demonstrate continued momentum (after the Feed Henry acquisition just over a year ago) and integration with existing Red Hat JBoss technologies- specifically the Unified Push Service which was in development upstream at the AeroGear project before we acquired FeedHenry. You can find more about RHMAP 3.6 here.

JBoss EAP 7

Finally we released JBoss EAP 7.0 BETA last week. This is a significant release in every respect; the last major EAP release (EAP 6.0) was back in June, 2012 and EAP 6 is now about 8 months away from entering its long-term maintenance phase. Among the major features in EAP 7 are :

• New high-performance web subsystem based on Undertow - supporting Servlet 3.1, WebSockets, HTTP Upgrade
• New high-performance messaging subsystem based on Apache ActiveMQ Artemis - same searing performance as HornetQ but expanded protocol support and Artemis is now the standard message broker for all JBoss products.
• Supports Java EE 7 - full and web-profile and Java SE 8.
• Enhanced (JSR-352) batch support - including cluster support, management of batch jobs and IDE (JBDS 9.0) integration
• Improved upgrade experience from previous versions of EAP / WildFly and better support for competitive migrations using Windup.

I written have a longer blog post dedicated to EAP 7 if you want more detail.

As always - you can download the BETA via the Red Hat Customer Portal or from JBossDeveloper if you don't have access. Release notes are here. And you'll need some developer tooling to go with that - JBDS 9.0 is available for download here.

Here's to a busy and productive 2016 - it's going to be huge !