JBoss unveiled several pieces of core technology that will be featured in its forthcoming Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (EE) 5.0 compliant application server, JBoss Application Server 5.0. The new features, which are being previewed at JBoss’ user conference and exposition in Berlin, include significantly enhanced platform services such as clustering, messaging, and web services that deliver enhancements in reliability, performance, and interoperability.

Considered an enterprise application server category leader by industry analysts, JBoss Application Server is the most widely used Java application server on the market. Hundreds of global enterprises currently leverage JBoss Application Server for their Web applications. The highly anticipated, next generation of JBoss Application Server will provide a more powerful platform for modern applications such as SOA (service-oriented architecture), rich client, and rich internet applications.

“With JBoss Application Server 5.0, JBoss will continue to drive innovation and deliver enterprise software to the mass market,” said Ram Venkataraman, director of product management, JBoss. “The core technology components that we have released are designed to boost performance, scalability, and reliability of our runtime application platform, taking us one step closer to delivering our Java EE 5.0 compliant application server. The JBoss community is encouraged to download and start developing today.”

The core technologies available today include:

JBoss Web Services. A JAX-RPC 1.1 compliant SOAP stack custom built for the JBoss Application Server architecture, JBoss Web Services now supports all Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) compliant web services, including WS4EE 1.1, WS-I Basic Profile 1.1, and WS-Security 1.0. In addition, developers can leverage annotation-driven web services (JSR-181), a new feature in Java EE 5.0, to simplify the creation of web services on JBoss Application Server. JBoss Web Services is compatible with Microsoft.NET.

JBoss Clustering. Re-architected to better conserve memory and resources while improving overall performance, scalability, and reliability, JBoss Clustering now supports both fine-grained and buddy replication. Since fine-grained replication replicates only values changed within an object, it minimizes network traffic and provides a scalable way to share objects across a cluster of servers. Buddy replication, on the other hand, offers the ability to replicate cached objects to specific servers within a cluster. As a result, network traffic and memory are both minimized while ensuring failover of the collective state of the cluster, even if some servers go down.

JBoss Messaging. JBoss Messaging is a fully compatible JMS 1.1 implementation and substantially improves high availability features such as distributed destinations, in-memory replication of the messages and transparent client failover. A re-implementation of JBossMQ, JBoss Messaging can be used with JBoss Application Server 4.0.5 and will be the default messaging platform in JBoss Application Server 5.0.

JBoss Seam. JBoss has quickly delivered new features to JBoss Seam, its innovative unified component programming model and framework. New features in JBoss Seam 1.1 include data-oriented application wrappers for entity beans, integration with Ajax4jsf, support for atomic conversations which greatly reduce database roundtrips, exception handling via annotations, ability to integrate RESTful pages into stateful page flow, and a new concurrency model for AJAX-based applications.

JBoss EJB3 (Enterprise JavaBeans). JBoss Application Server’s implementation of EJB 3.0 has been updated to reflect the final specification including Java Annotation support for Session Beans, Message driven Beans, and Entity Beans as well as a simplified persistence model based on Hibernate.

Hibernate. Announced last month, Hibernate 3.2 is one of the first object/relational mapping software to be compliant with Java Persistence, which was introduced in Java EE 5.0 to simplify the development of applications using data persistence. Hibernate 3.2 is now integrated with JBoss Application Server, providing developers with a Java Persistence provider out of the box.

These new technologies are available today and all will work with the current version, JBoss Application Server 4.0.5, which can be downloaded from http://jboss.com/products/jbossas.

These technologies will be featured in the upcoming Beta release of JBoss Application Server 5.0 targeted for December 2006. The final JBoss Application Server 5.0 release will be Java EE 5.0 compliant and is targeted for the first half of 2007. JBoss Application Server is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) and supports all platforms, including Linux, Solaris, and Windows. It is currently bundled in the Red Hat Application Stack. Subscription support for JBoss Application Server is available from Red Hat (http://www.jboss.com/services/profsupport).