BANGALORE, INDIA: Last October, JBoss.org came out with the latest stable release of JBoss Application Server (JBoss AS) version 4.2.2. The key components of the Java Platform Enterprise Edition (EE) 5.0 are integrated onto the new JBoss's MicroKernel architecture. It's a J2EE-certified platform for developing and deploying Java applications, Web applications, and Web portals.

The latest release provides all J2EE 1.4 features and extended enterprise services such as clustering, caching and persistence. To check how well it works and what new does it offer, we downloaded it from www.JBoss.org, installed and implemented it.

Installation
Installation was quite simple; we just had to extract its zip file to a directory, and we could start the server from there. Since this AS requires JDK5; we installed it on a Vista machine running JDK6. As per JBoss's documentation, you can run the server on JDK6, but full support for JDK6 will be available only with the release of JBoss 5. We implemented it and tried to deploy a WAR (Web archive) file, which was using Java DB by placing it on the deployment directory while the server was still running.

The application server was able to hot-deploy the WAR file. The whole process of installing and deploying a test application took less than 10 minutes.

There are three settings defined for deploying this application server: minimal, default and all. With 'minimal' settings, one could configure what all services are required, and thus, can reduce the server's start-up time .

The Web console lets you monitor and modify the configuration parameters through the use of MBeans

Features
The JBoss AS includes the latest Tomcat 6.0 Web server which provides the necessary support required for developing JSP 2.1 and Servlets 2.5 specification-based applications.

The integrated 'Hypersonic database engine' provides database support as well. Similar to its previous versions, support for Java Message Service (JMS), JavaMail, and Java Transaction API (JTA) are still primary features. JBoss uses JDK 5 for running, meaning that users get the liberty to work with Annotations as well as EJB3.

JBoss AS provides full support for Java-based Web service applications, which are now being incorporated in most business processes. Clustering and distributed application deployment is the other feature. The latter allows creation of an applications farm on a single server.

The Web console of this AS is not as intuitive as that of WebLogic, but it provides all features for controlling and monitoring the server. You can monitor and configure the parameters of resource attributes by use of MBeans (managed beans).

Bottom Line: An enterprise class application server offering complete support for JEE apps, and will offer application portability with its next-awaited release, JBoss 5.