BANGALORE, INDIA: One of the most popular open source app servers, JBoss, is now being offered through a subscription service as a stable release from Red Hat. This platform is meant for organizations seeking enterprise-class, open standards solution to build and host services in a Service Oriented Architecture.

Here Red Hat, with its investments in JBoss.org open source middleware community, is offering components from JBoss stable for application presentation, service hosting and data persistence in a single middleware solution at an affordable price.

JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) integrates Java EE and Web 2.0 technologies to provide a solution for enterprise Java applications. The Application Platform includes a stable release of JBoss Application Server for deploying, hosting and clustering of enterprise's Java applications and web services.

The platform also includes JBoss Hibernate for object/relational mapping (ORM) and data persistence along with JBoss Seam, a framework for building Web 2.0 applications. In all, this entire platform offers a suite of technologies that remove complexity and simplify development of Java applications, and also improve a developer's productivity.

JBoss EAP is interoperable with most operating systems like Windows or Linux that are capable of running JVM. It is also compatible with any JDBC compliant database like IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL etc.

The JBoss App Server provides full support for J2EE 1.4 services and also includes extended support for Java EE 5. Developers get the ability to work with annotations, JSF 1.2, Java Persistence API 1.0 and EJB 3.0 for their applications.

The integration of Hibernate with EAP provides mapping from Java classes to database tables and from Java data types to SQL data types and also provides data querying and retrieval facility. This relieves the developer from manual data persistence programming tasks. JBoss Seam is a framework that supports unification of both app component model through EJB 3.0 and view component model through JSF 1.2, AJAX and Portlets.

Red Hat provides two subscription models for JBoss EAP service support. The Standard support entitles the user to avail support at daytime on weekdays only through web, phone or emails for one year. Premium support, on the other hand, offers round-the-clock support for a year. Both subscriptions are sold as four CPU units. Apart from support, subscription includes security fixes, updates and access to newer versions released within subscription validity.

The installation process is a cake-walk. You only need to have JDK 1.4 or higher (JDK 5 is required when applications are based on EJB 3.0). Once the JBoss EAP is installed, the start menu programs are created to start and stop the server. Though the default JVM bind port is 8080 for application deployment, you can change the port settings from sever.xml file. The web console is easy to understand and when we deployed WAR (web archive) file on the server, the Application Server hot-deployed the archive, and the application was up and running. The installation of EAP also includes two demo apps that can be used for further reference or as a starting point for other applications.

Bottomline: A useful open source middleware that will allow enterprises to shift their budget from middleware deployment costs toward service and support.