Professional open source company JBoss kicked off its first-annual JBoss
World 2005 conference in Atlanta with the launch of two programs designed to
beef up enterprise support for open source software, officials announced
Tuesday.
The JBoss Network and JBoss Open Source Federation build upon the
Atlanta-based company’s JBoss Enterprise Middleware System (JEMS) platform, a collection of open source projects supported by the company’s professional open source services.
JBoss provides for-fee services to open source projects hosted at its
developer site under the premise that businesses will adopt open source software as long as there is professional support available for the applications.
The Open Source Federation is bid to develop more open source projects and
get them to integrate with the JEMS platform, which in turn will give
companies more incentive to switch from proprietary software. JBoss
provides developers with a Web site on the JBoss site to host their project,
as well as support to get their project under way.
JBoss will provide infrastructure, project launch assistance and access to
third-party project information for proprietary software developers who want
to take their application open source; open source project developers will
be able to retain their project at existing open source project sites like
the Apache Software Foundation, Eclipse or SourceForge.net while they are
part of the JBoss program.
The caveat is that while any open source project with an approved Open
Source Initiative (OSI) license can join, it must integrate with the JEMS
Platform, and project developers must be able to provide support for any
customer who decides to use their software application, such as application
training and documentation.
“There really won’t be many guidelines; the main guideline is they need to
share that professional open source vision,” said Shaun Connolly, JBoss vice
president of product management. “There has to be somebody behind it to
provide the support, the training and all the other stuff that is expected
from professional open source.”
Officials said they have already signed three open source projects to the
federation: JasperReports, a Java-based reporting tool currently hosted at
SourceForge.net; Synch4j, a data synchronization and remote management
project for mobile devices; and XWiki, a Java wiki
Unisys is contributing resources for a JBoss Administration
Console, a Web-based automated server management interface running within
the JBoss Application Server.
While it seeks to attract more application support from developers, JBoss is
also beefing up its JEMS support for customers with the release of JBoss
Network, a portal that provides information on JBoss applications.
Connolly calls the console a “Windows Update on steroids,” giving customers
a single view into patch information and technical knowledge. The single-node
Future features include a reporting tool that discovers
which application version exists on a particular machine in a network and
the patches available for that system, as well as support for JBoss
Federation applications.
Also announced Tuesday was the production release of Hibernate 3.0. The
open source, Java-based project provides a framework for mapping from Java
classes to a relational database, as the two data types are incompatible.
According to officials, it’s a time-saving application that frees developers
from as much as 95 percent of the manual SQL coding otherwise necessary and
a core component to the applications that make up the JEMS platform.
Some of the added features in the latest version include:
- Hibernate filters, which simplify access to historical data by
allowing for specific queries that are stored in a single result set. - Monitoring and management support to diagnose system information to
isolate system performance problems. - More flexibility, such as the ability to map an object to multiple tables
and over-ride Hibernate-generated SQL with hand-written
SQL. - Support for Java Specification Request 220 (JSR-200), Enterprise Java
Beans 3.0. - The Hibernate Eclipse Toolset, a full port
of the
Hibernate console to Eclipse.
