Last year, we announced our application platform product strategy, JBoss Open Choice, which focuses on helping our customers find the right size application architecture to meet their development and deployment needs. Numerous Red Hat customers, such as NYSE Euronext, continue to benefit from this strategy, which provides them with the choice and flexibility to run the various enterprise applications required for their business.

Building on JBoss Open Choice and the ongoing benefits offered by Red Hat’s subscription model, we are pleased to announce the general availability of these important minor releases:

Both platforms include enterprise support for popular frameworks Hibernate and Seam and also include JBoss Web Framework Kit, which provides customers a fully certified and supported way to use open source technologies such as Google Web Toolkit, RichFaces, Spring & Struts. Whether a customer is deploying traditional on-premise applications or cloud-based applications, these flexible platforms provide application developers with the ability to choose different programming languages, frameworks, component models and APIs that best fit their needs, without sacrificing IT operational stability.

Key features of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5.1 include :

  • Expanded Web Services support: building on the previous technology preview, full enterprise support is now provided for the Apache CXF as an optional web services stack.
  • Performance improvements: throughput increases across key application platform areas including web services, Enterprise Java Beans, and transactions; 15% better throughput on composite benchmarks, up to 22% faster start-up, smaller memory footprint and faster node-recovery during failover/recovery.
  • Improved security: technical preview of PicketLink Federation with support for Federated Authentication and SSO using SAML, decentralized identity support using OpenID and an STS supporting WS-Trust.
  • Expanded database support: JDBC 4.0 support and certification of JDBC 4.0 drivers for industry standard databases
  • Common Criteria: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5.1 is currently in evaluation for Common Criteria Certification at Evaluation Assurance Level 4+.

Both JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5.1 and JBoss Enterprise Web Platform 5.1 are available today from the Red Hat Customer Portal. Updates will also be available to Red Hat Certified Cloud Providers, including Amazon’s EC2 cloud.

To fully expand on the rich feature set within these solutions and learn more about each platform’s roadmap, register and attend Red Hat’s JBoss Application Platform 5.1 webinar series.