JBoss officials are set to announce Monday a re-branding effort to portray the company’s offering as a whole middleware platform, not just the application server.
Information on the JBoss Enterprise Middleware System (JEMS) is already available on its site; the marketing effort is essentially the fact that their platform is the sum of all the separate projects it’s a part of today.
JEMS is currently made up of 12 individual open-source projects: JBoss Application Server, EJB 3.0, Hibernate, Javassist, JBoss AOP, JBoss Cache, JBoss IDE, JBoss jBPM, JBoss Mail, JBoss Portal, JGroups and Tomcat.
The Atlanta-based company’s work – and business model – has grown beyond the open-source application server that first put the company on the map. While still popular — the JBoss Application Server has been downloaded more than five million times — the company has expanded its professional open source support to include several other open source projects, as well as their own in-house projects.
“The idea is to change the idea of the name expectation from JBoss the application server to JBoss the JEMS middleware platform in the professional open source methodology,” said Marc Fleury, JBoss chairman and CEO.
Fleury said the company will spend the next one to two years filling the gaps in the middleware platform with new modules and projects.
He emphasized that although the projects now fall under one name brand, it doesn’t mean the company is mandating the use of the whole platform in an enterprise setting. While JEMS can be used to support the entire middleware stack, developers can plug-and-play their own preferred applications in lieu of JBoss projects, even proprietary ones, thanks to the JBoss MicroContainer, which exposes an application’s features to plain old Java objects (POJO).
“Unlike our competition, BEA [Systems] ] and IBM
, that do a platform play, we don’t mandate that you buy the whole tarball
